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How can I create my own font?

A

adameels

macrumors member
Original poster
Jan 11, 2008
79
0
Milton Keynes
Hey everyone, this is my first thread on this site... I haven't been to any forums in over 5 years, it's kinda weird.

Anyway, I need help with making my own font. I have a design on paper, which uses roman, hellenic, cyrillic and arabic alphabets including punctuation, diacritics and special characters like german eszett (ß). It's part of a building design which signage uses this font as part of the theme of the design drawn up. But I want to start using this font in InDesign CS3 which I'm using to make a portfolio. How do I go about doing that, and do I need additional software?

Also once I have the font made, how can you automatically replace text that uses a certain font with another font?

Thanks in advanced

edit: if it helps, I have the CS3 Design suite
 
Outdated?

adameels said:
Funny I was just looking at that right now. Looks slightly outdated for its price. It's weird there's no feature within Creative Suite for this.
Click to expand...

A step up from Fontographer is FontLab Studio. Both are made by the same company. A good resource/introduction to them is LOGO FONT & LETTERING BIBLE.

I still have Fontographer version 4.1.5 (OS 9), which qualifies for the $99 upgrade. It allows you to create Mac or PC TrueType and PostScript fonts. With an additional plugin called FogLamp you can create crossplatform OpenType fonts -- something FontLab does natively.
 
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adameels said:
Funny I was just looking at that right now. Looks slightly outdated for its price. It's weird there's no feature within Creative Suite for this.
Click to expand...

Well, adobe's early digital typefaces were created in Illustrator 88 (then Ikarus), but Adobe has never had any interest in creating a commercial font development tool.

Fontographer was a macromedia product that went on hiatus for about 10 years. Since that time, Fontlab has been the tool that professional type designers use, including the type design staff at adobe.

The fontlab company has bought fontographer and has recently resuscitated it, but it seems quite limited. I'm not sure there is a large enough market to support both tools.

If you are using a lot of unicode characters, you want to use opentype, it has a far larger glyph set that a traditional type 1 / truettype font.

If you want to avoid Fontlab's 800+ page manual, Leslie Carbaga has a small book titled Learn Fontlab Fast.
 
Excellent. Thanks for all the advice. Don't know why font creation has little resources. If successful might just share my font here.
 
There is also TypeTool (form the same company as Fontographer and Fontlab Studio).

TypeTool is somehow like Fontlab Studio Lite... anyway, it is still much more advanced, than FontLab's (formerly Macromedia) Fontographer.

It is for hobyist, graphic designer and anyone, who need to simply modify fonts or build from scratch. Maybe some advanced features are missing, that FontLab Studio has, but all-in-all it's great.
 
Kwill said:
A step up from Fontographer is FontLab Studio. Both are made by the same company. A good resource/introduction to them is LOGO FONT & LETTERING BIBLE.

I still have Fontographer version 4.1.5 (OS 9), which qualifies for the $99 upgrade. It allows you to create Mac or PC TrueType and PostScript fonts. With an additional plugin called FogLamp you can create crossplatform OpenType fonts -- something FontLab does natively.
Click to expand...

Actually, Fontographer was made by a different company Aldus, the same people who made Freehand, and was recently purchased by the FontLab people.

I've used both, FontLab is definitely better, but Fontographer works very well.

Yourfonts.com is fine for a quickie font at ~18 pts or smaller, anything bigger and you start to see the equivalent of Adobe Livetrace they use, lots of jagged edges.

Haven't tried Fontforge, free can be good or bad :p oh goodness, those screenshots look like Mac OS -2!
 
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