It’s really easy to make a font of your handwriting, but at the same time, it’s kind of tedious…

First, go download FontCreator. It’s a great program that’s free to use for 30 days, and if you’re only going to be making one font, that’s way more than enough time. If you decide to create more fonts after the 30-day evaluation period, it costs $80 to register. Okay, moving on!

At this point, what I did was open up Flash and wrote with a graphics tablet, “THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG” in casual uppercase handwriting (obviously you’ll need to write it again in lowercase if you want a complete lowercase character set for your font as well).

You don’t have to use Flash, and you don’t have to have a tablet–the thing you need here is a good, clean sample of every letter of the alphabet in your own handwriting. You could write it on a piece of white paper with a black felt-tip marker and scan it in, whatever. Additional characters you will probably want to include: @ # $ % & ” ‘ . ! ? - ( ) and every single-digit number.

Once you’ve done that, separate every letter into its own file–the program suggests a 300×300 pixel square–and save it as either a .gif, .bmp, or .jpg. I saved them as .gifs and this seemed to work just fine.

 

Open FontCreator and start a new font. Fill out the properties screen that pops up (select “do not display outlines“) and you’ll be presented with a grid of every possible character in your font. Double-click the capital A.

Click “Tools” then “Import Image.” Find your capital A graphic and set your tolerance level to whatever looks good to you. Click “Generate” and a vector image of your A will be made.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What you want to do here is size it so that the top of the A is aligned with the CapHeight line and the bottom is aligned with the Baseline line. When you do your lowercase character set, you want the tops of most letters to align with the x-Height line, though some characters like h and k are going to extend all the way to the CapHeight line, while others like g and q are going to go all the way down to the WinDescent line. Adjust the red dotted lines to the left and right of the letter to reflect how much space you want around it. When you’re done sizing, simply close the window and you’ll go back to the character grid screen, ready to start on the next character.

Repeat ad nauseum. It’s tedious to do an entire character set but the results are worth it. It’s especially nauseating to think about how, if you want a truly COMPLETE character set, you have to add a bold and italicized character set as well…but whatever, Photoshop can do faux bold and italics anyway.

 

Anyway, when you’re done, save your font and install it, and it’s ready to use! Here’s a sample of my own handwriting font. This is the fourth font I’ve used for George comics, and I’m sure that it will be a permanent fixture now…such are the benefits of having your own, personalized font!