how does one create a font?

wild_eyed

what do i need to do?

KdjaCL

get a decent paint tool and draw it and save it as whatever the font file type is, i seen a guide on this with PSP before http://www.google.ie/search?q=create+font+paint+shop+pro&ie=UTF-8&hl=en&meta=

kdjac

hostyle

There are a few software packages available to create fonts. The names escape me, but I think Macromedia had one called Fontographer. I'm sure Adobe have one too. They're not free though.

Adeptus Titanicus

Fontographer and it's ilk are very good high-end font creation programs, but if you just want to do a once off, you could do worse than trying the aptly names "Font Creator Program" from high-logic. It's very simple to learn. You can outline your charcters manually, or if you have gif/tiff/jpg images you'd like to turn into a character, you can import them also.

The Online User Guide gives a reasonable introduction. I think things like sizing and metrics need a bit of playing with sometimes, but you'll pick up the rules by experimentation.

FCP works for 30 days free, so if you can create your font in that time then great. Otherwise you can register for $50... (Though I'm sure less scrupulous people might work around that)

Inspector Gadget

Bear in mind that TrueType/OpenType/Adobe Type 1 fonts are all vector-based, which means that you have to build them up from individual lines and curves (i.e. knocking up a pretty bitmap in PSP is right out - vector mode or nothing. If you go the bitmap route, you'll have to draw the characters at each point size you intend to view them at - bitmaps of such low resolution scale horribly if you choose a non-designed-for size, as I'm sure anyone who's used pre-TrueType versions of X Windows, Mac OS and Windows can attest.

If you're looking to create a variable-width font, you also have to caredully control how individual letter pairs are spaced from each other (this is called kerning). You also have to worry about vertical alignment, maintaining x-heights (making sure the middle horizontal "slice" of each lower-case character - the bit that a lower-case "x" would occupy - is uniform, as well as controlling the ascenders and descenders (the bits that stick above and below this region in each letter), keeping the serifs (artistic flourishes at the end of lines/curves) looking uniform, and so on and so forth...

Creating a good font is a genuine pain in the ass - you'd want a good eye, an ability to draw, and a LOT of patience. Drawing a font where every letter looks like it belongs there (that all the characters look similar enough that they'd be visually identifiable as a single font) is the hardest bit, from what I've read. As far as I remember, Fontographer is the tool of choice (didn't know Macromedia flogged it these days, though).

Good luck...
Gadget

Adeptus Titanicus

Originally posted by Inspector Gadget
i.e. knocking up a pretty bitmap in PSP is right out - vector mode or nothing.

Just to point out that many of these apps will allow you to vectorise (with varying degrees of success) a raster image, so it is entirely possible to import a bitmap. This is then converted to vectors that will probably need some massaging to get really perfect results (they typically create far more nodes then necessary to describe the character)). It can certainly save time depending on the characters. I've done complex symbology using true type fonts for mapping and such, and they can be a bitch to draw, but I agree, if you can do them from scratch using vectors, that's the way to go. But a little help (cheat?) using rasters to kick them off, (if they already exist) this can speed things up a bit. You still end up with a vecor-based font.

Inspector Gadget

The difficulty with vectorising tools is that they tend to either over-simplify the image they vectorise (losing a lot of detail) or generate far too many vectors, causing the shapes to be far too complicated. Not only does this make refining the newly-vectorised character shapes more difficult, the end result can behave unpredictably in certain situations (the one that springs to mind is when the outline of a font is used, say in a graphics/art package - the results from a poorly-drawn character can be horrific).

However, with sufficient care (and a lot of touching up), it is possible to start with a raster/bitmap/whatever-you'd-like-to-call-it, but it's of dubious benefit in the long run, IMHO.

Gadget