How do I make a font?

September 10, 2008 4:04 PM

How do I make a font?

I'd like to make a font from scratch.
Assume I don't know much about fonts.
I have a good eye.

Help me out with:

books
websites
show me some fonts you like and tell me why you like them?
font history
people who are doing interesting things with fonts
please also tell me whats new and avant-garde?

also i would like to try and design fonts for non latin scripts. arabic, thai, japanese, bengali. help please?

Anon cos of my boss.

posted by anonymous to writing & language (15 comments total)

I don't know much about how to get you started, but for the final stage, if you are going to draw out the font by hand, this website makes it easy to convert a scan to a font, and you could use Photoshop to get each letter lined up right or to use a bunch of separate scans. Anon, this is a pretty general question. Are you asking how to make a font that's visually appealing and legible, to compete with fonts like Helvetica?
posted by mccarty.tim at 4:10 PM on September 10, 2008

Forgot to add the link to Fontifier, the website I was talking about. And I know you can't respond anonymously. If there is an edit function, I feel like a real idiot now.
posted by mccarty.tim at 4:11 PM on September 10, 2008

If you'd like to learn about some of the history of typography, I highly recommend checking out the documentary Helvetica (wiki). Great flick.
posted by booticon at 4:17 PM on September 10, 2008

An essential book to start out with is Robert Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style.
posted by camcgee at 4:18 PM on September 10, 2008

You should probably also spend some on the Typophile forums for all of your typography needs, and as far making fonts are concerned, Fontlab and the associated products within are where you want to be devoting some attention.
posted by jeremias at 4:39 PM on September 10, 2008

Graphic Design and Reading has some good essays on readability and such.

I also recommend the Bringhurst book that was mentioned by camcgee.

Hang out at the Typophile forums. Lots of very smart people there. It can be intimidating, but you can learn a lot.

Start with pencil and paper.

show me some fonts you like and tell me why you like them?

This paradigm doesn't take into account the bigger picture. I don't really like or dislike a font. Rather, I find some fonts to be better suited to certain applications than others. Are you designing a font for highway signs, or a font for paperback books? Make some decisions about what you're trying to accomplish before you get started.
posted by kidbritish at 4:51 PM on September 10, 2008

just FYI, this is a non-trivial task you are asking about. Be prepared to do a lot of research, and a lot of painstaking, niggling-detail-style work.
posted by rachelpapers at 5:25 PM on September 10, 2008

1) Typophile, as linked above.

2) The best freeware font creation/modification program is FontForge. If you are on a Windows box, you will need to install Cygwin to run FontForge. It's not that tough, to be honest.

3) It will probably take you a very long time to make a font that is "good." There are just short of a trillion things you need to get right. The best modern type designers are weird amalgams of artist/mathematician/engineer/programmer.

4) Read the Typophile forums (and archives) again. They have discussions on stuff for beginners as well as just unbelievably hairy/complicated Arabic-OpenType-Python-encoding-ligature-godknowswhat problems.
posted by Optimus Chyme at 5:26 PM on September 10, 2008

P.S. Just for example, here is a thing that would be good to know: what is the difference between a Bézier spline and a quadratic Bézier curve? If you do not know this, that can be a problem when you are designing/creating a font. It is, as rachelpapers noted, hell of non-trivial.
posted by Optimus Chyme at 5:29 PM on September 10, 2008

There are only a few books that are nuts-and-bolts in regards to type design. I have Designing Type, by Karen Cheng. It is somewhat general in terms of explaining the construction of letterforms - you'll have to figure out how to translate the principles to your own design work. Leslie Cabarga's book is more technical - how bezier tools work, etc. I think the Bringhurst is required reading for anyone who is serious about typography, but it won't teach you how to make a typeface.

As others have said already, Typophile is definitely the best online resource.
posted by O9scar at 5:32 PM on September 10, 2008

If you're starting from scratch, this terrific NYT mag article is an great place to start- it provides an introduction to what goes into creating a font, and shows you why something most people never think about (the shape, size, and spacing of letters) can be so important.
posted by foxy_hedgehog at 7:26 PM on September 10, 2008

I was just revisiting a previous Metafilter post about this that has some good resources in it.
posted by lampoil at 7:40 PM on September 10, 2008

Depending on your mathematics background, you may enjoy Knuth's "The METAFONT Book"[1]. METAFONT is certainly not a common way to design fonts, but it worked for Knuth and Zapf. YMMV.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201134446
posted by jrockway at 3:09 AM on September 11, 2008

I used fontifier for my own font - its cost me $9 and I can say that I got my money's worth. The font is OK, but obviously automatically generated. I ended up editing it with FontForge to correct some of the letters. If nothing else, use the FF auto-kerning function - fontifier does not include any kerning and adding it makes your font look 1000 times better for very little effort.
There are other problem with fontifier. It only generates the common english characters, no accents or special characters. Also, it only generates the normal version of the font. On Windows this does not matter so much, because the font renderer with generate a bold or italic version as required. On MacOS the font needs to include additional information for this to work and I still haven't quite got this right. FontForge is supposed to be able to do it but it isn't working for me.
posted by AndrewStephens at 4:01 AM on September 11, 2008

If you're just looking to create a font for fun and happen to have Corel Draw, it isn't so hard. Corel Draw isn't free - it's vector graphic software that just happens to have the ability to save multi-page vector designs as true type fonts. It's kind of rude and crude and the professionals would scoff, but if you're like me and just want to have fun and make a font from your handwriting or something, it's more than adequate.

What I did was wrote out each letter the way I wanted it and then scanned it in to Photoshop. I brought it into Adobe Illustrator and used Live Trace on it (it's better than Corel's trace program, but you could use that too) in order to make it vectorized. Then you bring it in to Corel and use the font wizard they have. It ends up being laid out in a way that each letter has its own page. I don't know if you have control over any of the spacing or maths of it, though. I didn't get into that part of it.

Anyway, I thought I'd mention Corel Draw if you happen to have it. If you don't, the other methods listed here are probably much better.
posted by bristolcat at 7:58 AM on September 11, 2008