Handwriting to TrueType Font

Oisintarrant

Hey!

Im trying to put together an application that would compile a font from a template of a users handwriting. Theres a hundred websites and downloads for this like fontifier.com etc.. but Im doing it for my own interest in it as Im trying to learn more about the process.

So far Ive figured that the scanned image needs to be converted to bitmap (.bmp) which is fine. Ive done that in C# before. And I know truetype .ttf would be the format to go for. And that the bmp file would need to be broken apart into individual glyphs. Unfortunetly this is where Im stuck. How do you create a .ttf file?! Google has a million ways to convert glyphs to bmps but none the other way around.

Im really looking for some guidance rather than code. What should I be looking at to do this. Its definitely possible as its been done to death.

Any help is greatly appreciated!!
Oisin

Hoku

Now this is just an idea, but would FontForge work?
It seems to have the option to import BMP but I'm not sure if it will do exactly what you need.

I've only ever used FontForge to convert some Windows fonts to Mac, but it might work.

Oisintarrant

Thanks Huko, I got a copy of fontforge yesterday but it seemed so broad and scattered that it made me skip it and keep looking. Ill look into it again now you mentioned it, it would need to be able to work almost like a plugin to my main application. Thanks again for the reply.

Oisin

Oisintarrant

Ive had a play around with font forge, its not really waht Im after. Maybe I should be looking for code. Any ideas?!

Thanks!

Oisintarrant

I know this might be a case of flogging a dead horse asking about this again, however, I may as well give what I know incase someone attempts the same in future.

To build a font, you need to import the scanned image as a bitmap image, then divide it up into individual sectors, this may or may not relate to Vector Imaging.

Once this is done, you can somehow use these images as individual letters in the typeface. I may be miles out there but no one seems to know anything about this anywhere I ask.

Oisin

S.M.B.

Think I might do this over the next few days. I've no idea how you'd go about creating an application to do this (converting bmp to vectors to .tff file) but will give it a go using some existing tools.

Oisintarrant

SMB, if you get anywhere with it, could you let me know your approach to it? It would be greatly appreciated.