![]() You’ll see your characters appear in the main window. Select Edit→Select→All, then Element→Autotrace.Point it at the first of the image tiles (uni0020.png), and Import. Now File→Import…, and use Image Template as the format. This should result in a bunch of files called uniNNNN.png in the current folder, like these:.If you miss out the call to the shell, it will just print out the commands it would have run to create the character tiles. You might want to put a new font in a new folder, as the next stage creates lots of files, and might overwrite your old work. Save the image as a Portable Bitmap (PBM).I also scale and threshold the image so I get a very dark image at 300-600dpi. Crop/rotate/skew the page so the very corners of the character grid table are at the edges of the image, like this: I find it helpful at this stage to clean off any specks/macules.You want to scan in greyscale or black and white. Scan the page, making sure the page is as straight as possible and the scanner glass is spotless.Keep well within the lines there’s nothing clever about how splits the page up. This doesn’t work very well if you use thick paper. The second page is guidelines that you can place under the page. Print at least the first page of chargrid.pdf.chargrid.pdf – the font grid template for printing.– splits up a (very particular) bitmap grid into character cells.autotrace or potrace so that FontForge can convert the scanned bitmaps to vectors.FontForge, the amazing free font editor.NetPBM, the free graphics converter toolkit.It might need Cygwin under Windows I don’t know. ![]() I wrote and tested this on a Mac (with some packages installed from DarwinPorts), but it should run on Linux. ![]() ![]() This process is a little fiddly, but all the parts are free, and it uses free software. This looks more than a bit like my handwritingīecause it is my handwriting! Sure, the spacing of the punctuation needs major work, and I could have fiddled with the baseline alignment, but it’s legible, which is more than can usually be said of my own chicken-scratch. One day I may update this post, but for now, I’m leaving it as is. There’s also some font cleanup I’d recommend, like resolving overlaps, adding extrema, and rounding points to integer. Most of the *Ports Apple software repositories have given way to Homebrew: you may have some success on Mac (untested by me) if you brew install netpbm fontforge potrace. The technology of fonts is deep and wide, and if I had any idea what the hell I was doing, it would have been much faster :)) FontForge does have a Help menu which can help you out.That means that installation and run instructions may not work as well, or even at all. I was able to figure out how to do what I wanted and get it done in about 30 minutes. Remember it's free, so don't complain! Just roll with it. They do not use the main menu bar, so you need to use the menus and buttons in the window. Follow the link given by Apple and do it. When you launch FontForge, Mac OS X will probably tell you that you need to install XQuartz or X11. For occasional use, FontForge is a good replacement for SigMaker, and I thank the developers. Apparently FontLab has decided to let it die, and my very occasional need for a font editor does not justify the price of a commercial font editor. A few years ago I bought SigMaker from FontLab for 30 USD, but the current version on the FontLab website is still a PowerPC app which no longer runs on modern Macs.
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