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Updated Oct 11, 2008 by hashao2
Usage  
Usage Page

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Here are the procedures on how to write your own font. Yes, write the font, not create one.

Basic procedures:

open image->create grid->generate character index->save font->export .sfd.

Screencast

  1. Font Industry Screencast 01 (8.6MB): Tutorial to create a TTF font from a low quality screen capture image.
    2. The quality of the final TTF is kinda poor because the resolution of the original image is quite low. 1 square inch (~3cm) glyphs scanned in at 300dpi or 600dpi should yield better result.
  2. Font Industry Screencast 02 (15MB): Tutorial on the "Set Charcodes to String" function.
    3. Sample pages of a book from an online library was used. The book can be found at http://nla.gov.au/nla.gen-vn1889757. The images were pre-processed manually with Gimp.

Steps

Note: The executable name is fontin.

  1. Print out a page of grid template. It will be used as a guide while writing glyphs. (Download grid templates from here)
    2. Hint: For charset GB2312/GBK, a 96 cell glyph sheet make it easier to track code point. A 48 cell glyph sheet can be used for big calligraphy.
  2. Write your font glyphs on a piece of paper. Use the grid template created above as the background. Write the glyphs in the code order for the charset of your choice.
    3. Tip: Use a clip to stick the foreground and background papers together.
  3. Scan in the sheet at 300dpi/600dpi or higher resolution. Save images in the .png format.
  4. Start the Font Industry (the command is 'fontin').
  5. Open the scanned image with Font Industry (File->Open Image)
  6. Drag the rubber bands to set the glyph cell size.
    7. Tips: Adjust the right and the bottom bands first such that they are at the middle of characters; then adjust the left and the top bands to make the margins symmetric.
  7. Create the grid lines for the image. (Action->Create Grid)
  8. Repeat 6 to 7 until you are satisfied with the grid.
  9. Unset the click buttons in the cell to mark bad cells.
  10. Select a charset order from the Order combo box.
  11. Set a start character for the set of glyph (Action->Generate Characters)
    12. You can type in a single character or type in a hex code of the character e.g. 0xa1a1.
  12. Save the result into Font Industry's native font file. (File->Save)
  13. Load another glyph sheet and repeat above steps until all your glyph sheet are processed.
  14. Generate fontforge's .sfd font. (File->Export to FontForge)
  15. Open the resulting .sfd font in fontforge.
  16. Export the font into a bitmap font (File->Generate Font).
  17. Open a new font, import the previous bitmap font as background. (File->Import... and select As Background)
  18. Select all the glyphs. (Edit->Select->Select All)
  19. Ask fontforge to autotrace your font to scalable font. (Element->Autotrace)
    20. More information about autotrace can be found at fontforge's autotrace page.
  20. Fine touch the font, set proper font informations.
  21. Select all and Remove the background images. (Edit->Clear Background)
  22. Export to OpenType, TrueType font. (File->Generate Font)
  23. ...
  24. Profit!

P.S. You can hint an end cell by focus on the cell and click the "Toggle End" button. Any cells after this cell will be treated as garbage.

Well, I am sorry that it takes your more than 20 steps to get to the profit part, but it is actually quite fast once you get to know the streamline.

Image Pre-processing

You are suggested to pre-process the scanned images with mkbitmap before use the images in the font industry. mkbitmap is a utility of the potrace program. For example: 

convert image.png ppm:- |mkbitmap -n -s 3 -t 0.52 |convert pbm:- -type Palette -quality 0 blackwhite-image.png

which converts an image by turn off the high pass filter(-n), then scale up by 3 (-s 3) and finally, convert to black & white bitmap using 52% of black as the middle point (-t 0.52). convert is a tool of ImageMagick. convert can be used to do much more work on image pre-processing.

Since the high pass filter was turned off completely, we can achieve the same result using convert only: 

convert -resize 300% -threshold 52% -type Palette -quality 0 image.png blackwhite.png

In a batch nut shell: 

#!/bin/sh
for i in "$@" ; do
 outname="bw-${i}.png"
 echo "Saving to ${outname}..."
 convert "$i" ppm:- | mkbitmap -n -s 3  -t 0.52  | convert pbm:- -type Palette -quality 0 "${outname}"
 #convert "$i" -resize 300% -threshold 52% -type Palette -quality 0 "${outname}"
done

Enjoy your own hand writing font and FLOOD the font market. Don't let me down.

Charset Table

When write your own font, you will need a grid sheet and a character set table of your character set.


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