Creating fonts

If you would like to turn your constructed alphabets into fonts, there are a number of ways to do so: you could buy one of the professional font creation tools available from Fontlab, you could use a free font editor such as FontForge or Softy, or use the font creation service Fontifier.

Today I found out about another font tool, FontStruct, a free online font editor which looks good and fairly easy to use. The site also has a gallery where you view fonts created by other people and add your own creations. When I can find a spare moment or two, I’ll have a go at converting some of my ideas for con-scripts into fonts.

3 thoughts on “Creating fonts

  1. Although I’m no longer using Windows (the above-mentioned FontForge is the only real inexpensive- free, actually- alternative for the Mac, which I’m on now), there is also another inexpensive font editor for Windows you didn’t mention, and one I strongly supported when I was using Windows: FontCreator, which can be found at http://www.high-logic.com/ – It is REALLY good, and alot easier than some of the more commercial editors while being able to deliver quality font creations. 🙂

    d.m.f.

  2. I also am a very big fan of High-Logic’s font creation program. I’ve been using it for three or four years now, and not only is it easy to use, it creates high-quality fonts. I’ve used it for everything from creating new fonts from scratch to editing other fonts.

    I highly recommend it for creating fonts for any language, whether conlangs or new scripts for already-existing languages. It is possible, with that program, to assign each “picture” to any character on the entire unicode map, as well as set kerning, etc.

  3. I think maybe there should be a contest here, to see who can turn their pencilled conscript into a good looking typeface with FontStruct. Typophile.com had a similar contest a few weeks ago (just to render a single word though). Anyone can draw out characters, but do they work in real world applications like on computers? That’s the test of how viable a conscript is, I think.

Comments are closed.