Font Creation tutorial part I: the basics - Typephases Design : the notepad http://www.vectoralia.com/typephases/fontcreation1.

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Contents of this article:
called The Typephases
Introduction Observatory. It�s our blog where
What is a digital font we periodically add some new
Necessary equipment and Workflow thoughts, links and whimsical
Starting points for a typeface occurrences. Here�s its RSS feed.
Step by step Find also more ideas and
Scanning inspiration in our Specimen book
How to trace the contours and the Serving suggestions.
Creating the glyphs
The vector shapes: important details
How to generate the font
Font making programs
Resources
Part 2: Advanced techniques and tips

To create a new typeface isn't a particularly difficult task. Indeed, the idea is
very easy to get, and the necessary equipment, very basic . At the worst, we can
regard the process as something more or less laborious, and it requires good
organisation and planning. This guide doesn't aim to be either a complete manual
on fontmaking or a tutorial about the software you will use (there can be plenty
of programs involved -or just one, depending on what you choose.) This is only a
quick, start level, introduction; if you want to achieve optimal results, some
advanced understanding of those programs is recommended. Once you begin to
have more confidence in creating fonts, go on to part two of this workshop.

The best starting point is to study the workflow diagram below. It illustrates the
whole process: which kind of files we will deal with, what programs can be
used. We can follow different paths to get to the same result: a digital font for
the computer, so we can choose the procedure that best fits our equipment,
software and skills.

What is a digital font

A TrueType or a Type 1 font is a group of vectorial drawings. They can be scaled
with no loss of quality. The vectors that describe each character are stored in a
file, which we shall install in order to use the font. In the PC platform, the
TrueType files have a .TTF extension, and the Type 1 files are composed of two
files: a .PFB and a .PFM file. This last file stores the metrics information. In a
Mac system the file structure is somehow different, but this is a minor
difference: the process of designing a font is pretty much the same, only
choosing another saving option in the last step.

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To create a digital font, we only have to 1) draw the shapes and 2) export them
as a .TTF or a .PFB + .PFM file. Well, this sounds like Monthy Python's How to
write a novel! There are plenty of programs that will help us in the first part,
drawing. However, the second part requires more specialized software.
Fortunately, a very common program, CorelDraw, includes a font-export filter.
What is more, the entire process can be completed from within CorelDraw. For
this reason, we will focus the techniques of fontmaking in using a drawing
application such as CorelDraw (and its user's manual includes detailed
information.) The tools these drawing applications include are usually easier to
use and more powerful than those in a font-making program, but the fine details
in a font file (kerning, spacing, hinting...) require them.

Necessary equipment and workflow.

Apart from the usual requirements for digital graphic design (or course, a
computer, which can be very basic, even an old 486SX PC if you use CorelDraw 3!
and the common programs), we will need:

A scanner.
Even an old b/w scanner will suffice: we don't create the fonts in colour,
but as black and white vectors.
Auxiliar drawing programs.
Used to acquire images in the computer, retouch where it's necessary and
prepare them for the typeface. Even the Paint app included with Windows
will do, but it is recommended to use a propram with more features:
Paintshop Pro, the Gimp, Photoshop, PhotoPaint, PhotoImpact...A recent
version can be overkill: even PSP 4 will be more than enough -that's what
I use.
Programs to convert the image to vector.
This isn't absolutely necessary, but it will help speed the process and
keep it in control. Most designers use CorelTrace or Adobe Streamline as
vector tracer, if the program itself doesn't include this option. The vector
editing programs include Freehand, Xara, Illustrator , and CorelDraw. The
two first have an internal tracing utility. There is a basic (freeware in its
version 2) vector editing tool, called Mayura Draw that will do, too.
Programs to generate the font file.
Several programs can do this last task. On the one hand, we have
dedicated solutions, from entry-level shareware programs like Softy or
The font Creation Program (FCP), to full-featured fontmaking professional
tools (Fontographer, FontLab .); on the other hand, there is the special
case of CorelDraw, a swiss blade of a program that will let you export as
a digital font. So, if you already have Corel, this is a good starting point
before buying a dedicated program. This isn't a plug: you may love Corel
or hate it, but it's an extremely powerful program that can be found as a
bargain, and it includes many extras (tons of clipart, premium quality
fonts...)

The diagram that follows is a workflow for fontmaking. It considers almost every
option; includes the programs that can be used and the kind of files they will
work with. And you can choose your own itineraries.

Starting
points for a
typeface
First, we shall
design the
characters of a
font (the glyphs).
The diagram
shows some of the
possibilities:

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1. A drawing on
paper
2. Every drawing
implement will
do: pencil, ink,
eraser, paper, or
technical tools:
ruler, measures,
T-square,
whatever. It can
be our own
handwriting. Then,
we will have to
load the file into
our computer. We can draw directly with our painting or drawing program
3. or even the font-creation program. We can use the mouse, or have better
control with a graphical tablet. Most professional-quality fonts have been
drawn with painstaking detail with a drawing application, using (or not) a
scanned template. We can modify another font, or digitalize a traditional
design

But first, we must check all the legal questions, copyrights, and all this stuff. If
it is legally possible, we can use another type design as the basis of our own.
There is another interesting possibility: we can recover old designs, and bring to
life (digitally) centuries-old typefaces. There is a good page at the University of
Zaragoza in Spain that explains the recovery of a XVIII century font, the Ibarra
typeface. Their page is a recommended complement of this tutorial.

Step by step
It isn't easy to detail the fontmaking process, because it isn't a single chain-like
task; it is grid-like, and it is possible to use different programs with different
routes. In order to cover most of the steps, we will follow the longest possible
routine, starting at the top of the workflow diagram, from a sheet of paper with
some letters drawn in, through the final step of generating a font. Of course, any
other route is possible: for example, you could complete the whole task in
CorelDraw or in ScanFont.

Scanning recommendations
The exact instructions and settings for your
scanner depend on every machine, but there
are some common points. It is better to scan
at 300 dpi or less, and use a sample the
largest the better. For example, characters
with a height of 5 cm. or more (2 inches) will
scan smoothly at 300 dpi. The reason why: if
you scan small characters at a very high
resolution you will get a lot of noise and a
contour that reflects every irregularity; a
low-rez scan of a big letter will let you
discard the artifacts without affecting the
overall shape, which is what you really want
to use.

Yes, forget your fancy 32 bit-colour, 2400 dpi

scanner. Set it to scan in greyscale, at a
lower resolution (300 dpi or even less if you have big letters.) If you want to
autotrace, this resolution is recommended; if you will trace the contours
yourself, and the scan will only serve as a template, you can scan the drawing at
screen (72 dpi) resolution.

It is often a good idea to apply a subtle blur filter to the resulting greyscale

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image, and refine it with the contrast and brightness or the levels controls. Use
the gaussian blur option if available, and test it to get a more soft contour. This
will polish the uneven contours and make the next step easier.

When the image is ok, we must save it. Save a greyscale copy (in the native
format of your application, or in a lossless format, such as TIFF, GIF or PNG.)
Then, convert it to bitmap (black and white); toy a little with the "threshold"
parameter to push more or less pixels to black. Use either the BMP or the TIFF
format, and save it. So now we have a bitmap file, like myfont.bmp. It is time
to scan the contours.

How to trace the

contours
If you examine the workflow
diagram, you will realize that
a number of programs will let
you bring your bitmap file to
the next stage, the vector file
in adobe illustrator or EPS
format. This vector file
contains shapes that are
defined by means of Bézier
curves, mathematical
instructions to place points
and adjust curves and lines to
them. This kind of
geometrically defined curves
are pretty much the same
stuff that makes up a digital font. Read your drawing program documentation
for a detailed description of Bézier curves, or visit some page such as Mike's
Sketchpad or the PostScript section of Luc Devroye's.

Let's see what the tracing step is. You must place anchor points and handles to
define the vector shape, on top of the bitmap image you prepared in the first
part. You can do it manually, but in many cases the autotrace option or a
dedicated autotracing tool will do a good work. If you are lazy and/or the
quality isn't a critical factor, forget the hand tracing and open the autotrace
engine!

When the either the autotrace or manual trace is ready, we must have something
like the figure shown here. The figure has been approximated with more or less
fidelity, by a number of anchor points that define vector shapes. Now we can
save the results as a vector file, in Adobe Illustrator (.AI) or .EPS format. It is
advisable that we use an older version of the AI format (version 5 or lower) to
solve any compatibility issue.

Creating the glyphs

Now, open your drawing application, or if you have it, your font-making
application. I will use CorelDraw as an example, because this is what I have, but
you could use any other vector drawing tool, such as Illustrator, Freehand, Xara
or even the humble but postscript-solid Mayura Draw. The process of font
creation in CorelDraw is covered in several other tutorials that you can find on
the net. Nick Curtis, of Nick's Fonts fame, uses it to create his wonderful
typefaces, and he has an article about his techniques (see the links below.)

First, we need a template to place the characters we will export to the font.
The size of the characters must be big enough to test the contours and be sure
they will look good at different point sizes. The recommended size is a 750 x 750
points page. This isn't the standard page in CorelDraw, so you will have to

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change it. Double-click anywhere on the page and the properties dialog will
show up. Then, place some guides to have consistent baselines, x-heights and so
on. Just make the rulers visible, and drag the top ruler to place a horizontal
guide, or drag the left ruler to place A typical template page should look like
the accompanying picture.

The

template is where you are going to place the AI/EPS files you traced before, or
where you are going to draw the characters from the start. Take advantadge of
the many and easy-to-use tools of your illustration application, and use the
options of copy-paste, scale, unite, split, etc.

One moment now. A complete font has many dozens of characters. If we don't
want to go nuts, it's better to tidy up our working environment. CorelDraw and
Freehand have a multipage option that you can use to place a character in each
page (sharing the same guides in all of them.) Even if you have a multipage file
it may become unmanageable with more than 200 pages; it is better to create
separate files, for example, for lowercase letters, uppercase, numbers and
punctuation and extended characters. In other apps you will have to use some
workaround, for example, prepare a page with groups of characters, with its
own guides, then select them individually to export them to the font file.
Another alternative, that will work even with very basic versions, like CorelDraw
3, is to have files with layers, where you put up your characters separately. Keep
only the rulers and the active layer visibles to work easily.

The vector
shapes: important
details
Creating the shapes can be
very easy if we autotrace
the image, or if we use
relatively simple shapes
(circles, rectangles) that
we weld, split or modify in
other ways. There are only
a few points that we must remember:

It is better to simplify the contours to the minimum number of anchor

points. If the vector has many nodes, it will be unnecesarily complex -it
could even prevent the font from displaying or printing correctly. More
complexity means more memory usage and often a worst quality. Keep in
mind that a shape can be defined with just a few Bézier nodes: for
example, a dot needs only two points. If you have started with a clean
scan, it is more likely that you will have leaner Bezier curves.

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Each character in the font must be a single path, filled and closed . If
necessary, you can use a and composite path. For example, you create a
dot with a single shape, a circle or ellipse; to create an hyphen you need
a solid rectangle.
However, to create an "O" you cannot do it with an empty ellipse. The
shape must have a fill. So you use two ellipses, and the smaller one cuts
the hole in the outermost one. And you cannot use intersecting paths: for
certain effects, you must use the "combine" or " create composite path"
option, together with "removing overlap" or welding several shapes into a
single path.
There is another detail that can be corrected with some programs, and is
the path direction. Composite paths have specific directions in each
component (clockwise or counterclockwise) and as a rule, they should be
inversed each time that a path contains another path. The outermost path
must be counterclockwise, while the inner paths combined with it should
have a clockwise direction. You can read more details about this topic in
an article on how to make fonts in Corel in their site, designer.com (see
the links down in this page.)

How to generate the font

The process of making single characters yeld the single or combined paths that
will make it to the next and last phase, generating the font file.

In CorelDraw, select one character at a time, go to the File > Export menu, and
choose Export as... then TrueType or Type 1, depending on the kind of font you
want to generate. Caution: You must check the box "only selected" in the export
dialog box. The following box will appear:

Here you
type the
name of
the font,
check the
box if you
are
creating a
Symbol
font, and
leave the
rest at their default values. When you press "Accept", another dialog box pops
up, this time prompting you to select the character that corresponds to the
shape-s you are exporting. In this example, we must find the ! character in the
central column, and select it:

Finally, we press OK in this dialog and we can repeat the process for the rest of
the characters.

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So, this is the way people creates fonts! This is boring as hell, isn't it? Yes, and
even with the Big Daddy of Font creators, Fontographer, you create the
characters one at a time, and the process is more or less the same as we have
explained above. So take it easy. Go get yourself a good coffee mug, put some
music and et to work. You can do it in several sessions if you get really bored.
But in the end we will have our own font creation, something we can share with
other people and -who knows- even sell. When the font is complete, we only
need to install it to the computer and start using it.

Font making programs

CorelDraw can generate fonts, but it proves very limited when it comes to define
most parameters of the font. It is good to create symbol, dingbat or illustration
fonts, but if spacing, kerning, and hinting is critical you must use a dedicated
solution to create and edit fonts.

Most font editing programs let you draw directly the character. In some cases
you can also autotrace them from a BMP or TIFF bitmap. And you can place
AI/EPS files created in other applications. Again, the many possibilities are
shown in the workflow diagram of this article. The main handicap of Font
creation programs is the price/functionality relation. They can be really
expensive and you will only use them for font creation/editing. This means that
if you create fonts ocasionally, you will find little use to the program. Consider
this: depending on the route you follow on the Workflow, you will need a proper
fontmaking program only for a short time. If you have some friend that has one
of these programs, if he lets you use his computer for a while, you can bring a
disk with your .ai or .eps files ready to place in the character slots, or better
still, a raw font produced in a cheap utility or in CorelDraw. Then, in a while you
can prepare a decent font and generate it. This is what I do.

There are several fontmaking programs that are available for trying out. The
most notable and powerful of these is Pyrus Scanfont . With this tool, creating a
font can be a matter of, literally, a few minutes. Just open a bitmap of the
font, or scan it directly with the program. One command separates the shapes
(that is, autotraces them), then you drag these shapes to a character map
window, and the font is ready. Name it and you're done! Amazing. It you start
with a clean scan of your handwriting, you can have it ready to use in a few
minutes. Of course, you may need to tweak individual characters, spacing, etc.
and you can do it with precision. You can try Scanfont to create up to five fonts!
Get it from their distributor, Pyrus or FontLab. The same company offers the
most advanced font creation program, FontLab, and a basic font editor and
creator, TypeTool (also with a 5-font tryout), together with some other type
utilities. A visit to their website is recommended.

There are two basic font creators, Softy and FCP ( The Font Creator Program)
that you can download from the net. The first is a very small program, but it
isn't very intuitive and lacks a good help system. FCP is available from High
Logic, in the Netherlands, and is a good starting point to learn fontmaking.

And finally, what about Fontographer? This used to be the most used font
creation tool. A professional caliber program, distributed by Macromedia. There
is no tryout version of this program, so you will not be able to get a feel for it
before buying. You can find more information about Fontographer at the
Macromedia site, and there is also a Fontographer newsgroup. However, many
years has passed since the program was last updated and it lacks many features
present in Fontlab.

Don't forget to take a look to the net resources listed on the below and to check
out the second part of this tutorial. Jump there...

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Resources on the net

These are some selected articles about fontmaking.
This collection makes almost a complete reference
book to get you started. These articles cover almost
every topic. If some of the links doesn't work, don't
blame me �in the Internet they get stale faster than
home made cream.

ChankDiesel tutorial
A very good and detailed tutorial chez Iconian Fonts (Dan Zadorozny)
Divide by Zero tutorial
Creating fonts in Corel Draw
Another detailed tutorial for CorelDraw users.
The digital recovery of a 18th century font, Ibarra, explained by ateam
from the University of Zaragoza. You can download the font, too.
Even more information about font-editing programs, and actually anything
relatedto type at Luc Devroye's On Snot and Fonts. Good coverage of
PostScript language, Béziercurves, etc.
Of course, a search on Google will yeld many good results. Take a look
and see for yourself.
A tutorial using Fontforge and Autotrace. The process described there
can be applied to any program, however.
See even more links about typography in our links page.
Now it is time to proceed to the second part of this workshop, where
we will learn a few tips and advanced techniques.

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