Your handwriting as font

Hello everyone!

Sorry for not posting for a very long time, but well, life was busy :).

Anyway, as the first post after a long break I thought about something nice for all of you. How about turning your own handwriting into a font? Wouldn’t that be nice for personalized (printed) letters and things like that?

I used to do that regularly many years back. Back then I would use a special software that was quite pricey by that time, yet it still took a lot of time and tweaking to get an acceptable result. The good thing is nowadays you do not really need any kind of special software (at least not if you do not want to create something exquisitely and fancy), there are websites that will transform your writing into .ttf (true type font) and .otf (open type font) for free.

So how do we go about it?

1. Go to one of these websites like http://www.myscriptfont.com or http://www.paintfont.com
2. Create your font. If you’re language isn’t English make sure you use a template that will allow you to add every kind of special character your language has. There are also templates for mathematical symbols and so on.
3. Print out your template and fill in the letters. There are guiding lines to help you get all characters in approximately the same height and length. It’s advisable to work with a bold black pen, to make sure that the characters will be read correctly by the software.
4. Scan your template sheet(s) in 300 dpi and in greyscale. Save the file as either .jpg or .tif. Make sure that the file isn’t bigger than 2MB, because most websites won’t accept larger files.
5. Upload it to the website, choose the type of font you want and don’t forget to give it a nice catching name aaaaaaand
6. You’re done! 🙂

 

 

PS: Please don’t forget that you will have to install the new font into your computer’s font library, before you will be able to use it with your text editing or graphic programs.

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