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I'm intersted in creating some TrueType fonts, and I've seen and tried some online creation tools that let you scan in your handwriting (such as FontCapture), but I'm looking for a more manual approach that would let me edit and design each character individually, for more precision and creativity. I also have a tablet, which is why I'm pursuing this. Do you know of any manual editing tools that can let me accomplish this?

I'm also experienced in Illustrator and Photoshop, so is there a method to create a font file from saved images of each letter, created in Photoshop?

On another note, I'm also looking for a .NET library to create a font file programmatically, but that will go on StackOverflow.

Thanks in advance!

UPDATE: I completely forgot to mention what OS I'm using and what OS I'm targeting for the fonts - that would be Windows.

UPDATE #2: I guess that my main question is how to manually create a TrueType font if you have all the images for the letters (if TrueType is the way to go). One of the answerers suggested Fontographer, but I think that's a little too customized - are there any bare-bones free (maybe even open-source) tools that just compile a font? Thanks again!

UPDATE #3: Sorry for so many updates, but I just looked at a tutorial of creating a font with Photoshop and Fontographer - Fontographer seems like a very good solution, but are there any free alternatives?

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What OS you looking at? – random♦ Sep 7 '09 at 2:53
I completely forgot to mention that. I'm about to update the question. – Maxim Zaslavsky Sep 7 '09 at 3:16

closed as not constructive by random♦ Dec 30 '12 at 19:48

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4 Answers

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Personally, I've used Fontlab's TypeTool. It's not free but less than $100, which is significantly cheaper than their recently revived Fontographer or their professional industry standard FontLab Studio.

If you want free, there's FontForge, but you need to use Cygwin (or a Linux VM) to get it to work under Windows.

All of those will allow you to start by importing your bitmap images for manual tracing. If you're looking for something more automatic, you could use another app such as Illustrator or Inkscape to automate tracing and import the resulting vectors into the font app as a starting point.

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up vote 2 down vote

I have been using Fontstruct recently. Online, Free, Works great!

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Took a look at fontforge? I vaguely remember a java based one i was playing with ages ago as well, but i can't for the life of me remember what it was called.

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Is it called DoubleType? I've tried Fontforge with Cygwin, but wasn't able to use it very well. – Maxim Zaslavsky Sep 7 '09 at 3:28
I just tried playing with DoubleType, but haven't found a way to insert an image into it. – Maxim Zaslavsky Sep 7 '09 at 3:37
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Fontographer is good. Other than that there are font tools in TeX, but that's not for the faint-hearted.

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