Font creation programs
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Last update: Fri Nov 20 16:27:43 EST 2009
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Font creation programs |
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A free on-line truetype font editor, developed by Golan Levin, with the help of Jonathan Feinberg and Cassidy Curtis. (Alphabet Synthesis Machine is a co-production of Art21, Inc., New York City, and The Arts Company, Cambridge, MA) It has a | |
Apple's page on digitizing letterforms.
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Developer (with Ari Rappoport) of LiveType at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. LiveType is font creation software that uses a parametric model for the fonts and allows the user to specify any number of constraints. Useful for creating multiple master fonts. You may also find some fun font applets at his site. ParamTT is a the complementary font design tool to create and manipulate LiveType characters.
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Font editor by Pyrus/FontLab for Asian type design. Mac and Windows.
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ATF Type Designer |
Early typeface editor by the ATF/Kingsley people, which was capable of handling truetype, PostScript type 1 and 3, BDF bitmaps, Mac bitmaps, and Windows bitmaps. It was withdrawn. The developers included Jens Alfke and Henry Schneiker. It is rumoured that this program incorporated some of the old ATF optical scaling ideas. Its features are discussed at Typophile. A blurb taken from the ATF text: "ATF Type Designer I will come in several variants. A basic package, comparable to Fontographer 2.0 in scope, will cost $449 for a private license. That is, the user cannot make fonts for sale. However, he can prepare fonts and logos for in-house use. Hint-insertion tools are an extra $750; the Optical Scaling module is a $1,000 option. Commercial type designers must pay a much higher price: $55,000 plus a royalty of $3.40 per face. Alternative licenses, trading off the up-front fee for higher royalties, may also be negotiated." See also this Seybold report from 1989.
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ATypI 2007 was held at the Faculty of Arts and Architecture at the University of Brighton in Brighton, UK, from 12-16 september 2007. Its TypeTech section was reported on by Christophe Badani here. Since it is in French, I will loosely translate it for my readers:
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Japanese foundry that markets about ten Latin and twenty full kanji fonts. Among its type families is LSN or Lambda Truetype Font. Finally, it sells a font editor for Japanese fonts, called LFEdit.
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Martin Weber's free program for Windows and UNIX machines for converting bitmaps into outlines. See also here.
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Thomas A. Fine's free X11 BDF (bitmap font) editor. Some of his BDF fonts can be downloaded here.
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Bernhard Kaulfuss (email) |
Reported to be writing a shareware font editor.
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Free font editor for BGI format fonts (BGI=Borland Graphics Interface).
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BitCopy 2.0 costs 2000 USD, plus 186 USD per year for maintenance. Creates bitmap fonts for Xerox FNT, PostScript type 3, AFP, HP LaserJet, PCL4 and 5, from PostScript and truetype fonts, Atech FastFonts, and other bitmap fonts. A bitmap font editor is included. By Lytrod Software Design Tools.
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Free java-based utility for creating bitmap fonts, written by Italian Daniele Saretta. The format is text-based.
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"This software helps you draw (create) your own bit-mapped font for VT220+ and Wyse terminals (or other terminals which can emulate them). In the future it may be extended to generate font for printers. You draw the characters as *'s in a text file using any editor or word processor. Then this program scans these drawings and converts them to the soft-font code needed for downloading to terminals or printers." Free, by David Lawyer.
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Free on-line bit font maker by Pentacom. Includes the BitFont Museum, where one can download about 850 pixel fonts made with this software. Growing daily!
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Free open source graphical tool that allows the import of scanned (tiff, jpg, gif) and vector (postscript, pdf, dxf, hpgl) data, the vectorisation, editing and creation of data (and page layout), and the export of vector data. It runs on Linux (X-Windows) and Mac OSX. It can be a useful tool as a preprocessing step in the creation of fonts, when starting from scans of drawings or from pictures of typefaces.
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Tutorial.
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Archive with font tools. Includes FontCreator and Softy 1.07b. Dead link?
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Comparing TTX, OTFDK, DTL OTMaster and FontLab Studio 5
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Thomas Phinney compares small font editing tasks in truetype and opentype fonts, and looks at four options: TTX (free), Adobe's OT FDK (free, admittedly less handy than TTX in his own words), DTL OTMaster (commercial and similar to TTX) and FontLab Studio 5. Excerpts from his blog: Currently, if I want a simple and accurate representation of the contents of a TrueType or OpenType font, and possibly to edit the info, I have been using the wondrous open source TTX tool, which is based on the FontTools library. This dumps the font info to an XML text file, which can be viewed/edited in any text editor or anything that can handle XML. It can also recompile the text file back into a font. (In fairness, Adobe's FDK for OpenType also has table dumping/recompiling tools, just not quite as slick as TTX. Even Adobe folks often use TTX.) [...] The downside to tools like TTX and OTMaster is that they make little effort to tell you the meaning of the various cryptic values for various fields (or the exact meaning of the field itself), even when said values are legal/legit. So you need to also have a copy of the OpenType or TrueType specification handy, and optionally a more descriptive, hand-holding tool like FontLab Studio. [...] FontLab Studio 5 interprets the OpenType font into its own internal format. It can't open a font, make a tiny change and re-save it as a font without potentially changing other things. To give a really concrete example, FLS displays font embedding settings in terms of its interpretation of the settings, rather than the actual bits. TTX or OTMaster are really handy for that, because they show the unvarnished truth of what's in the font, without interpretation.
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Lengthy and thorough comparison of Type Designer and Fontographer with a minor discussion of FontLab thrown in as well. A must before you buy.
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From Pyrus/FontLab: "CompoCompiler creates composite fonts automatically. You can use an existing composite font as a template (to determine which composite characters to make) or create your own. Then just tell CompoCompiler to create composites for any other font using the template and in seconds you've finished a job that could have taken hours!" For Windows.
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Tutorial by "Destiny's Lady" on font creation via Fontographer.
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Laurie McCanna's tutorial and hints on making fonts. In particular, she discusses CorelDraw.
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Gary David Bouton explains how to create fonts. Although this wonderful expository page is copyright of Corel, the discussion is rather general most of the time. Corel Draw is only dissected near the end.
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Site with many barcode font tools, a barcode font set by Chaos Microsystems, the truetype font utilities CSFontUtility, TTFViewer, the truetype embedding bit modifier embd100e, the FCP2 font editor, and the font matcher (matches a BMP with all truetype fonts in a folder).
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Daniel Rodríguez Valero received his PhD in Arts in 2006 from University of Barcelona, where he also got a Postgraduate in Digital Typography. He teaches Typographic Design and Digital Typography in the Arts Faculty (University of Barcelona) since 1999, and Graphic Design in Advertising studies (University of Alicante) since 2002. He teaches Digital Typography at the máster ibérico em design, Oporto (Portugal). He has created a new system for type design called Constructor in collaboration with Marc Antoni Malagarriga I Picas, a programmer. Constructor is a glyph editor based on calligraphic curves, which he presented at TypeTech, ATypI in Brighton in 2007. He writes: Constructor is a new tool for type design, open source and cross-platform, based on a calligraphic heritage that provides new possibilities. It can be combined with production tools like Fontographer or FontLab, because its finality is to construct outlines extrapolating some instructions or parameters given by the user. It works with only one master and produces different letterforms that can be copied/pasted to a font editor. It will help to design quickly a complete family, so the benefits of this new system for type designers are tremendous. He claims to be inspired in part by Gerrit Noordzij's theory of type design as explained in The stroke of the pen.
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Software corporation based in Düsseldorf and Needham Heights, MA. From the web page: "DATA BECKER CORPORATION (www.databecker.com) is a privately held publisher of high-quality, value-priced computer software and books for the North American retail market. DATA BECKER CORPORATION, founded in 1999, joins its associate company, DATA BECKER GmbH & Co. KG (Düsseldorf, Germany), one of the leading publishers of computer software, books, and magazines throughout Europe. Together they form a worldwide publishing powerhouse with operations in every major consumer software market." "Your Handwriting/Mi Letra/Meine Handschrift" is a 20 USD utility that lets you transform your scanned handwriting (you need a scanner though) into a handwriting font (truetype). For PCs. It can also be used to create fonts. Alternate URL (CD ROM Meine Handschrift). Alternate URL. See also here, here and here. Data Becker also sells a cheap CD with 2500 truetype fonts called Goldene Serie Schriftenpaket.
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British firm that markets FontMaker, a partial truetype font editor developed by Derek Floyd. Handles TrueType, type 1 and bitmaps. It can import type 1 fonts, and thus should be able to transform type 1 into truetype and vice versa. Between 140 and 630 USD. Also sells special hinting software, as well as foreign language fonts.
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Java-based open source truetype font editor, created especially but not exclusively for Japanese. "DoubleType is designed with collaborative creation in mind. Unlike other programs that work on a single binary file, DoubleType stores each glyph in separate text-based files. This allows people to utilize existing collaborative tools such as Wiki and CVS, to share their work and send patches."
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DS Design
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North-Carolinian distributor of Type Designer and creators of the Kidbag type collection. Kid Type Paint was designed by Jane Scarano and Jake Scott. Designer at Creative Alliance of the kid's handwriting faces KidType 1 and 2, as well as DingBrats. FontShop link.
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A set of utilities by the Dutch Type Library for Mac and PC that allows one to professionally produce and correct fonts. Developed in coordination with URW Hamburg. Includes BezierMaster, ContourMaster, InterpolateMaster, KernMaster, IkarusMaster, TraceMaster and DataMaster. The DTL FontMaster team:
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Commercial combined graphical and table editor. From the announcement in January 2009: The Dutch Type Library and URW++ are proud to present DTL OTMaster, a highly sophisticated application for opening, reviewing, editing and saving tables of fonts with a snft file structure, as there are CFF and TTF flavoured OpenType fonts, TrueType fonts and TrueType Collection fonts. Font editors, like for instance the DTL FontMaster suite, FontLab Studio and FontForge, rely on their own internal data formats for type design and font production. In case of the batch oriented FontMaster modules, this is either an IK or a BE file, for the Ikarus and Bezier outline description formats respectively, along with data files for character and font encoding, font naming, kerning and OpenType Layout features. From these data, binary fonts for the end-user are compiled as the very last step in the font production process. OTMaster is a tool for inspecting and adjusting such binary fonts, irrespective of the font editor used for their creation. A unique feature of OTMaster is, that it makes the editing of tables possible from a graphical user interface. Furthermore, it comes with built-in tools like the Glyph Editor for proofing and editing contours or even drawing glyphs from scratch. A 'kern' Table Viewer is available for proofing and refining the kerning, and a 'GSUB'/'GPOS' Viewer to visually test (and in case of GPOS also adjust) these OpenType Layout tables. OTMaster was programmed at URW++ in Hamburg, Germany. The FM Team (Dr. Juergen Willrodt, Axel Stoltenberg, Hartmut Schwarz, Peter Rosenfeld and Frank E. Blokland) was joined by Karsten Luecke as advisor and also author of the OTM manual and Nikola Djurek for the design of the function icons in the Glyph Editor. OTMaster is available for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. Free light versions: Mac OS X, Windows, Linux.
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Tarmsaft and DincType archives. Plus a tutorial in Italian on font creation via Photoshop and Fontographer.
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From New Zealand, Norbert Haley's page with free demos of Type Designer (Manfred Albracht's font editor). And a custom font design service.
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German software company that markets Manfred Albracht's Type-Designer (v3.1 for 249DM) and other Type Related products for the Wintel platform. Available for under $100 in the US, but more expensive in Europe. Reported to handle Truetype better than the competition. A demo version is available from the website. [Note: Pyrus and DTPSoft have now joined forces, and Type Designer is being discontinued. DTPSoft will be marketing FontLab etc. in Europe]. Font software and font services. Sells TypeDesigner, FontLab, SigMaker, TypeTool, FontExpert, and ScanFont, to name a few.
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Paul Haeberli's free C code (1989) for transforming mouse positions into dynamic (and calligraphic) strokes. A free port to OpenGL and GLUT (and Mac OSX) by Nicholas Zambetti is here. Zambetti lives in Ivrea, Italy.
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Fontographer: Introduction.
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ParaType's editor (for Windows) for truetype fonts made from handwriting samples.
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S-FL3E01.ZIP and S-FL3E02.ZIP have FL3E. Alternate site. Also, searching http://ftpsearch.city.ru/ with the string s-fl3 may give you some hits.
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This FontLab software converts Fontographer database files (versions 3 and 4 are supported) to FontLab files. FogLamp is available separately (for both platforms) and in bundles with Fontographer and TransType Pro. Combination of Fog, FogLamp and TransType Pro allows to build Fog-based font-editing environment which can generate OpenType fonts in both flavors as well as any other font format.
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FON bitmap editors | FON format bitmap editors for PC include [Google] |
A fantastic software program, available during the mid nineties, and brought to the market by Ares Software Corporation. It allowed to mix and match and extend and blend and parametrically shake fonts. Its auto-hinting features were unequaled. The program is still around in some archives, and gets posted occasionally on abf. Laurence Penney's take: FontChameleon (created by the same team that brought us FontMonger and Letraset FontStudio) was an extremely powerful font manipulation program. Its power resulted from taking direct control of outline editing away from the user. Using a new way of representing fonts, where each character was defined as a set of "difference descriptors" from a generic outline, Ares created close approximations of 150 well-known fonts. These all shipped with Version 1.0 - which cost around $300. Using on-screen slider controls, you could adjust the weight, width, x-height, slant and tracking of these fonts, as well as blending one font into another! In general, all characters of all fonts were defined in terms of repositionings of the same set of control points (though letters such as 'a' and 'g' had more than one point-set for obvious reasons). Exploiting stylistic consistency within a font, these repositionings could be parametrized so that each font was expressible as a 2K parameter set - compared with 40K to 60K for standard font formats. So this new power could save 95% of your fonts' disk space too. A simple use of FontChameleon's blend feature would be to interpolate between Helvetica Regular and Helvetica Bold. With my second try on the program, I tried a more crazy use: interpolating between Garamond and Futura. Wow! All the grunge fonts you'll ever need, and then some! (Ernie Brock, one of its developers, told me how ideal TrueType was for much of the blending. You could use its interpolated on-curve points to vary a corner from sharp to curved: just bring two consecutive off-curve points together, and... we have a corner point.) Now that Ares is owned by Adobe, and bearing in mind the potential personality clash with multiple masters, FontChameleon (along with all of Ares' other font products) has been discontinued.
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Font Constructor
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A free standalone Mac application for building fonts in an intuitive way. By Frederik Berlaen of TypeMyType in Belgium. The only thing I can say is wow. It is a small tool, but the speed with which one can create outlines is fantastic.
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Ethan Dunham's tips on font editing. Dead link.
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Andy Benedek looks at the latest software packages for creating typefaces and optical character recognition. Mainly a discussion of FontLab versus Fontographer.
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Font Creator
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At High Logic in the Netherlands, Erwin Denissen (who is based near Utrecht) has developed a font editor called Font Creator. Delphi source code is free! It can take any TTF and OTF file. You can modify any glyph, and save it. You can convert scanned glyphs and bitmaps (.bmp files) to TrueType outlines, thus enabling you to create your own handwriting. No type 1 support. Windows only. At some point, Font Creator switched from shareware to payware. It also added Scanahand, a Windows tool for making handwriting into a font. His CV reads: Erwin Denissen started his career as an employee at ICT Automatisering, mainly working with Delphi. About two years later he switched to Bolesian were he made a move to Java software development. When Bolesian was eaten by it's big sister Capgemini in 2001, Erwin Denissen continued to work with Java. After several successful projects, and moving from software engineer to software designer to project leader, he decided to quit his job and fully focus on his own company High-Logic, he started back in 1997 as a graduate project. As an independent software vendor, Erwin Denissen strives to continue developing new and innovative products for the world-wide typography market. Right now High-Logic has three products, a font editor, a font manager and a font generator. In March 2008 Erwin Denissen acquired MyTools.com, including 8 products. In July 2008 yourfonts.com was launched as an online font generation service. More fonts related utilities are expected soon.
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Font Design using Illustrator |
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Font Programming Made Easy
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Dan Gayle's site about font production. Subpages on OpenType features.
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Font Remix tools
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Mac and PC software, initially free, and requiring Python. The tools written by Tim ahrens are plug-ins for FontLab that allow scaling of glyphs without affecting the stroke weight. Also, they allow to tune the width, height and weight of single letters interactively, automatically generate small caps, generate superiors, inferiors, numerators and denominators, create true condensed and extended versions, generate tabular figures with only a couple of clicks, and slant glyphs while keeping vertical tangents straight.
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Font software cracks.
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Karl Berry and Kathryn A. Hargreaves explain the steps needed to make fonts (type 1, bitmap) with "limn" and other UNIX utilities.
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Fontcapture
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Alexander Walter's shareware DOS-based program that can edit HP LaserJet bitmapped soft fonts. Free demo, full version requires 30USD registration. Walter lives in Middletown, NJ.
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From the FontLab team, a plug-in for FontLab 4.6 or AsiaFont studio. FontFlasher makes "Flash fonts" (bitmap truetype fonts) out of ordinary TTF or T1 fonts. According to the FontLab people: Regular TrueType fonts tend to get blurry at small sizes in Flash because of the anti-aliasing. FontFlasher creates new outlines for a font at a given size that eliminate the anti-aliasing and therefore produce much crisper, more legible renditions on computer screens. Tutorial by Dani Wahlers.
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FontForge
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George Williams' free Open Source UNIX-based font editor for type 1 and truetype fonts, previously called Pfaedit. Also does truetype collections (TTC) and opentype fonts. Note that FontForge can be used to do all conversions between all formats (type 1, truetype, OpenType; PC, UNIX and Mac): it's a formidable tool. The internal text format for fonts is called SFD. It is a format that is acceptable for communicating and storing fonts. Note also that there is a powerful scripting language that can automate conversions and various tedious tasks. Interview.
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A major font editor marketed by Pyrus, which also publishes TypeTool, BitFonter, AsiaFont Studio, TransType, FONmaker, ScanFont, FontFlasher, SigMaker, and CompoCompiler. FontLab 4 was released in December 2001. Demo on the website. Versions 3 and up are able to handle "native" Truetype as well as Type 1. Version 4.5 handles OpenType too. Docs and demos. FontLab was developed by Yuri Yarmola. Last version 4 for Windows: FontLab v4.6. Demo. Demos of most products. Latest version for Mac OS X and Windows, dated December 2005, and priced at 650 dollars: FontLab Studio 5.
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FTP search for Fontlab yielded the following results: Ultranet site, Croatian site, UNC site, OIT Russian Studies, Russian site, Another Russian site. sf01 site.
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Semi-lively forum oon the technical aspects of font design, and not just abut FontLab.
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Free trial of Fontlab. Limitation: you can export only 5 fonts.
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In PDF format.
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Fontlab review by Eugenia Loli-Queru. She likes it. One of her comments is telling: why not pay the 549 dollars for Fontlab so you can make your own font (by altering an existing font, if you read between the lines) instead of paying thousands of dollars for licensed fonts: "Operating system makers are encouraged to at least download the demo and try it out if they are serious about creating unique, high-quality fonts for their OSes instead of paying thousands of dollars on licensing ready-made high quality fonts for use with their OS."
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Here is what type designer John Hudson from Tiro Typeworks has to say: " The principal advantage of FontLab over Fontographer is that it actually implements the PS Type 1 and TrueType specs, rather than fudging it as Fontographer does. I've used FontLab 2.5 and 3.0 for Windows for almost 5 years, in a professional type design context, and can attest to their quality. I have also had nasty encounters with FOG data, and can attest to its quality.
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From Palisades research: a 129USD font editor for AutoCAD fonts. Plus lots of symbol and other fonts for use in AutoCAD. All pay-fonts. The editor has disappeared. A copy of it is at Pores Dot Net.
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Font editor first developed at Altsys and later taken over by Macromedia and finally, in 2005, by FontLab. Creators: Jim von Ehr, David Spells, James Brasure, Tom Irby, John Ahlquist, Kevin Crowder, Parry Kejriwal, David Fung, and Eon Chang. Mac and Windows font editor sold by Macromedia, Inc., 600 Townsend Street, San Francisco, CA 94103, USA. Fontographer v4.1: list price $495, but available for under $300. For example, Diskovery sells it to students in the US for 228USD (129+99), Windows and Mac. Also included in Macromedia Graphics Studio bundle, which may be available as a competitive upgrade. A well-established font editor on the Mac and the PC, the tool used for many fonts currently on the market. A demo version is available. Fontographer uses its own format for files, which has the same mathematical basis as Type 1, but can generate .TTF files. A copy of FOG4.1 was recently placed on alt.binaries.fonts. Free copies are floating around on some Russian FTP sites but you'll have to do your own detective work. Description. Technical notes. In April 2005, Adobe bought Macromedia. John Hudson remarks about this sale: Regarding Fontographer: it is very unlikely indeed that Adobe's purchase of Macromedia will lead to a new version of Fontographer. It is much more likely that the produce will be retired completely, and will simply no longer be available. The history of Fontographer and FontLab has shown very clearly that for a large software company like Macromedia or Adobe a font tool is simply not worth development investment. The potential market is simply too small to interest them. Font tools need to be developed by small companies seeking a niche market, and FontLab has demonstrated that this approach can be very successful. I suggested some years ago that Macromedia should simply give the Fontographer code, including the aborted 5.0 version, to Jim Gallagher. He has spent a good portion of his life nursing this code and providing tech support to Fontographer users, so if there is any future to Fontographer it seems to me that he deserves to guide it and to benefit from it, if possible. Perhaps Adobe might consider this. They have been generously supportive of the makers of FontLab, DTL FontMaster, etc., with their OpenType SDK code, so clearly encourage competition in the font tools business. Giving Fontographer to Jim for a dollar, and letting him do whatever he wants with it -- which might include open sourcing it, I suppose -- seems to me the best thing that could be done with this product. Otherwise, it might as well be withdrawn from the market, because it is never going to be updated by Adobe or any other large software company." In May 2005, Adobe/Macromedia sold Fontographer to FontLab, where Jim Gallgher (Der Fontmeister) will continue development of the software. In November 2005, Fontographer 4.7 was published--for the first time, it could be used on Mac OS X.
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Fontographer: John Hudson's comments |
John Hudson of Tiro Typeworks describes what happens behind the scenes when you import and modify fonts: " In the case of TrueType, Fontographer dumps all hinting, converts curves to cubic beziers, applies incorrect Type 1 autohinting, and then converts the curves back to quadratic beziers -- inaccurately in some cases -- when you export the font. In the case of Type 1, Fontographer dumps hint replacement points and flex hints, but doesn't do too much other damage."
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Tracy Gannon's Fontographer tutorial.
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Klaus Nielsen's Macromedia Fontographer tutorial.
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MIS Press book by Stephen Moye: a complete guide on typeface design using Fontographer. ISBN 2-55828-447-8. July 1995. 30USD. Out of press, but since the entire book is on the web, who cares?
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FontStruct
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A nifty and elegant free service by FontShop to make, share and download modular fonts, peppered, of course, with FontShop ads. FontStruct lets you quickly and easily create fonts constructed out of geometrical shapes, which are arranged in a grid pattern, like tiles or bricks. Once you're done building, FontStruct generates high-quality TrueType fonts, ready to use in any Mac or Windows application. You can keep your creations to yourself, but we encourage users to share their "FontStructions". Explore the Gallery of fonts made by other FontStruct users and download them or even copy them and make your own variations. Creation page. It is amazing how the 100 or so basic shapes can be combined in many beautiful typefaces---this is not just a simple generalization of a pixel font editor. I believe that FontStruct will see thousands of new fonts in the next few weeks. In fact, after only 3 weeks, they had over 21,000 registered users, and people had already made over 23,000 new fonts. FontStruct was made for FontShop by Robert Meek. List of all designers and fonts at FontStruct compiled by yours truly. My wishlist for them: to add all font designer names to their pages and inside the fonts, to organize a page by designer, to speed up their software or internet line (by a factor of ten), to fix the browser crashes reported by many (Allan Weiser and others; Mac OSX Leopard/Firefox has problems) and still crashes Firefox as late as July 2009) and to enable mass downloads and downloads per designer. Tutorial (video) by Rob Meek. Discussion and opinion by Jason Fagone. Daumen9 made by Crissov in 2009 exposes the fundamental flaw of all modular designs that work within the limitations of truetype or opentype or type 1---one can't achieve proper small circles. Not FontStruct's error---blame it on short-sightedness of the font format engineers.
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FontStudio 2.0 |
FontStudio was a font creation tool from Letraset that is no longer available. However, that does not mean it is obsolete, au contraire! Great typographers like Akira Kobayashi swear by it. As Lucas de Groot puts it: "Apart from paper and paper tools, nothing but FontStudio 2.0 for designing glyphs! Absolute precision, speed, huge amount of shortcuts and convienient stuff in the drawing area, auto-import of scans, best metrics/kerning tools, etc. It takes a while to get into it, to get to know the quirks. Too bad it's so difficult to buy these days." John Hudson adds: "FontStudio is a small, but very good PostScript (Type 1) font tool, which is no longer in production. There are certainly designers who swear by it, and we use it ourselves when we need to globally adjust kerning pair data and other small jobs which it still does better than any of the current programs. It does not, however, do TrueType hinting, nor even have native TT outline editing." Olivier Randier provides this glowing testimony: "FontStudio is a great software. Maybe a little difficult to learn when you begin (especially when you need to translate the handbook and the interface in french yourself), but how powerfull! The kerning editor still has no equivalent, I think (except maybe FontLab, but I'm not sure). The drawing interface is extremely precise and has functions I still wait for in Illustrator (OK, with PathFinder, Illustrator past through, now, but some things are still easier in FontStudio). I bought it ten years ago with my SE30 (MacOS 6) and it still bravely works on my G3 (MacOS 8)... OK, now it's getting old, because of new font formats, like OpenType, and other new technologies (plug-in, vector antialiasing, layers...), and it would need to be refreshed. I asked Adobe if they intented to keep on upgrading it, they said font editing softwares don't pay enough. They prefer to rely on Microsoft softwares ;( Now, I'm thinking about migrating to FontLab, but I will probably use it mainly for format conversion and cross-encoding kerning and stick to FontStudio for the drawing work, because I'm too much used to it, now. Really, if you work much on type, you should give it a try. As for Fontographer, I really can't work with, the interface is ugly, hardly legible for drawing, and kerning editor is nothing. But it may be a question of culture: I think people used to draw with Freehand would prefer Fontographer's look and feel, people used to Illustrator will find FontStudio more familiar. Fontographer feels like a toy for me, I really can't imagine seriously making a professional job with it." And Martin Archer says: "FontStudio was a much more humane program to use than Fog. Unfortunately it won't run on newer machines or on OS9 or newer. It had a fantastic range of zoom, the bezier tools worked intelligently, it had a superb background layer facilty and it had none of those stupid sound effects. I don't understand Adobe not releasing a commercial font creation program. How do they expect designers to make fonts to use with their graphics programs - by buying Macromedia's Fontographer? A mix of Fog and Fontstudio would have made designing a little easier when I still did it a few years back. I imagine that if I were designing fonts now I'd finish all the shapes in Illustrator and leave just the encoding part to Fog or whatever other program does that - although clearly just getting outlines into Fog is a pain in the neck. "
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Japanese font editor. Will create a variety of Japanese glyphs based on simple instructions.
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Written by László Szenttornyai.
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Type designers comment on freehand drawing programs besides Illustrator. They mention Inkscape, SodiPodi, Skencil and FontForge, which all run in Linux. Inkscape and SodiPodi both run on Windows and in the X environment on Mac OS X. FontForge will run in the X environment of Mac OS X and under Cygwin on Windows, too. Inkscape is an open source SVG editor with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, Visio, etc. Supported SVG features include basic shapes, paths, text, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, node editing, svg-to-png export, grouping, and more. Sodi Podi is a free vector-based drawing program, like CorelDraw or Adobe Illustrator from the proprietary software world, and Sketch or Karbon14 from the free software world. Sodipodi uses W3C SVG as its native file format.
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It is possible to freely convert an image into a glyph in a font. I quote: http://www.yourfonts.com/ offers a Font Template .pdf download that was designed for people who want to use their own handwriting as a font. You simply fill out the .pdf, scan it and upload it for conversion into a .ttf file. However if you're a savvy Photoshop or Illustrator user it won't take you long to figure out how easily that same template can be used to convert your image files into fonts. First convert the .pdf "Your Fonts Template" into an image file (.png seems to work the best). Then convert your original image file into .png files with transparent backgrounds. You can also use the 'Export transparent file' option in Photoshop. Then it's a simple drag and drop onto the "Your Font Template" image, and a quick resize to make sure it fits correctly the corresponding "letter box". When you are finished make sure you flatten the image and save it as a 300 dpi .gif, .jpg or .png. Your almost done! Upload the newly created Your Font Template image file at http://www.yourfonts.com/ and in less than 5 minutes your images will be converted into .ttf files ready to be downloaded.
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Quote: "Altsoft FTMaster (Font Type Master) is an application for font designing, editing and converting. It is completely based on Altsoft FTMBase .NET API which provides a comprehensive set of classes and methods dealing with a variety of modern font formats." It supports Type1, Type2, Type42, TrueType, OpenType, CID-based fonts, and Multiple Master fonts. Free evaluation version. Commercial product: 1000 US dollars. Written for Windows, it converts between formats, allows editing, renaming, generating multiple master font instances. Extracting fonts from PDF files is possible as well. Personal note: I see nothing in here that one cannot achieve with FontForge (free).
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Font service and font vendor. Euroglyph: add the Euro symbol to fonts. Fontage is a 6500DM bitmap font editor (.FNT and many other formats).
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gbdfed
| Freeware pixel font editor for Mac OS X by Mark Leisher. It works natively with BDF fonts, but can import
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Genotyp
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Michael Schmitz at the Universität der Künste Berlin developed a tool, genotyp, that allows one to blend and marry various types, the way Font Chameleon used to do. Discussion at TypeForum.
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Project to develop a free PostScript type 1 font editor. By Raph Levien.
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GlyphMaker/GlyphManager |
Soon-to-be-released software by Darren Mackay for editing and managing fonts. GlyphManager will be released as Freeware and GlyphMaker will be released as 'Fontware' (essentially designers send me a copy of each font they produce - a better description will be available when the website is up).
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Glyphs
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Flexible free font editor by Georg Seifert, announced at ATypI 2009 in Mexico City.
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GNU Font Editor (GFE) is a free graphical font editor for UNIX/X-Windows based on the GIMP Toolkit. It is easy to use and will eventually support many font types. Currently it supports only BDF font files, that can be converted to many other formats easily. Alternate URL.
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GOTE stands for GNOME OpenType editor. Free (beta-version) editor by Robert Brady from the Department of Electronics & Computer Science, University of Southampton. Currently supports truetype only. Requires the gnome libraries and freetype.
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Mailing list for the GOTE gnome editor, run by Robert Brady. Mail to all list members.
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Groovy Fonts TTF
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Patrick Burnens designed Groovy (free TTF) with CorelDraw. Some description (in French) of the design process to help others.
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From Croatia, V. Gaco's font editor for bitmaps (FON) on Windows.
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"Handy Pilot Font Editor is running on any handheld computers such as USR PalmPilot Pro, IBM WorkPads, and ofcourse 3COM palms." Looks like a bitmap editor for the handhels Pilot computers. Commercial product by Alexander Ovcharenko. Alternate URL.
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Type software link page, in Spanish.
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In August 2007, Avi Muchnik (Aviary) introduced Horus, an on-line font editor that is quite promising. It parses and opens truetype files, shows their outlines, dumps their tables, and allows changes in the truetype font data. Other tools by Aviary include Raven for creating vector art. They say: Aviary is on a mission to make creation accessible to artists of all genres, from graphic design to audio editing. We're a privately held company currently headquartered in Long Island, NY, with team members around the world. Our founders also created Worth1000.com, a talented community of 500,000 digital artists that participate in amazing daily contests.
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Instructions for Fontographer by Steven Hall.
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Tutorial.
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How to make monospaced fonts
| Erwin Denissen, who wrote the Font Creator Program, explains how to make any PC truetype font into a monospaced font with FCP:
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URW's font editor for UNIX workstations, Apple Macintosh and Windows 95/Windows NT PCs. Between 700 and 1000 USD. The web page says that the prices are for Macs only, so I am a bit puzzled. Do the other versions cost more? This superb piece of software was developed by Peter Karow.
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Adam Twardoch explains how to draw letters in Illustrator and import them into FontLab.
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An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format: Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface. It is very easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more. We also aim to maintain a thriving user and developer community by using open, community-oriented development. People have used it as a first stage in drawing glyphs for fonts, importing the vector graphics into FontForge or FontLab. Tutorial by Tavmjong Bah.
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Jelle Bosma (b. Rijswijk, The Netherlands, 1959) is an expert truetype hinter at Agfa Monotype in the Netherlands. He was one of the main type designers at Scangraphic from 1988-1991, where he designed Forlane in 1991. He relies a lot on his own software, including a truetype font editor called FontDame. He also claims that there are no more than 25 professional hinters world-wide. Alternate URL. He created WTC Cursivium (1986, World Typeface Center). In 2004, he created the OpenType family Cambria for Microsoft's ClearType project.
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Jim Gallagher, "Der Fontmeister", is writing a book on Fontographer, and provides support for Fontographer at his site, after having worked for ten years at Macromedia. He states here: "FOG will rise from the ashes or be cloned by my mysterious team of coders".
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Jukka Aalto, aka "Armadillo" comments from the font design trenches. Here are bits and pieces.
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Keith Edkins |
Keith from Cambridge, UK, is trying to write his own simple Truetype editor/compiler.
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Web site jam-packed with links related to TrueType software (editors, converters). Demo versions of FontLab, Fontographer, FontStudio, IkarusM, Linus M, TypeDesigner, FontMonger, BitFont, ReAdobe, FontDetective, FontMonster.
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Free on-line internet editor by LettError, which requires Safari 2.02+ or FireFox 1.5+.
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Bitmap to PostScript or Metafont filter for X-windows and UNIX set-ups. Free, but a fair amount of programming savvy is needed.
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Bitmap to PostScript or Metafont filter for X-windows and UNIX set-ups. Free, but a fair amount of programming savvy is needed. Part of the fontutils package, result of an ongoing GNU project. Help is needed.
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URW's commercial auto-tracing program for reproducing alphabets, logotypes, and contour representation of scanned art.
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Live Pen
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100 Dollar tool published in 2008 by Zero-One Inc for doing calligraphy in Adobe Illustrator. Free demo. Based in Moscow, the company was started in 2005 by Andrei Burdin.
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Lycos search for FOG41. Double 4 should be triple 4.
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Makers of Fontographer. Macromedia, Inc., 600 Townsend Street, San Francisco, CA 94103, USA. Fontographer v4.1: list price $495, but available for under $300. For example, Diskovery sells it to students in the US for 228USD (129+99), Windows and Mac. Also included in Macromedia Graphics Studio bundle, which may be available as a competitive upgrade. A well-established font editor on the Mac and the PC, the tool used for many fonts currently on the market. A demo version is available from Macromedia on CD. Fontographer uses its own format for files, which has the same mathematical basis as Type 1, but can generate .TTF files. A copy of FOG4.1 was recently placed on alt.binaries.fonts. Free copies are floating around on some Russian FTP sites but you'll have to do your own detective work. Latest deal: for 200USD, get the Macromedia Designers bundle, which included Fontographer, Freehand, Xres, & Extreme 3D.
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MadWolfZX |
Posted the serial number of Fontographer 4.1 on alt.binaries.fonts on October 30, 1999.
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Makefont is a free Perl script by Dror Bar-Natan (University of Toronto) for making figures drawn by xfig (a free Unix utility) into a metafont.
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Advice by Chank Diesel for beginners.
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Free type 1 font editor for Windows, created by Dr. A. Gebert. Direct download. English version.
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James Matthew "Matty" Farrow says: "I am interested in calligraphy, palaeography, and (digital) typography, and am currently writing an outline font editor for Adobe Type 1 fonts called spif. "
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MEEK 4.0
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Rob Meek's type synthesizer machine for making truetype fonts on-line. Repeat until you are pleased with the results. The web site does not work on any of the browsers/operating systems I am using. It seems to run on Windows only, sigh.
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From its developer, Serge Vakulenko: "Metatype is a set of utilities and scripts for creating TrueType fonts using Metafont language. It also includes two font families, named TeX and TeX Math, based on the D. Knuth's Computer Modern fonts, but extended with Greek, Cyrillic and other characters. Metatype and TeX fonts can be used under the GPL license." The TeX family consists of TeXBold, TeXBoldItalic, TeXItalic, TeXMono, TeXMonoItalic, TeXMath, TeXMathBold, TeXMathBoldItalic, TeXMathItalic, TeXNarrow, TeX, TeXSans, TeXSansBold, TeXSansBoldItalic, TeXSansItalic, TeXWide. It comes in TTF and BDF formats. Free software in pre-alpha development, for Windows and X11/UNIX/Linux. The code is in C and Python.
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Peregrine C.A.D. Solutions wrote this free program for creating AutoCAD fonts while in AutoCAD.
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Tutorial on font making.
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Free software for the generation of truetype fonts from handwriting using a tablet for PC. Developed by Philip Lanier from Washington. Example of a font made with this software.
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New Fontografia (was: David's Fontografia 2006)
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David Kettlewell (b. Edinburgh, Scotland, 1946), who has been professor at Tartu university in Estonia, and now works from his forest farmhouse in Bollstabruk, Northern Sweden, explains how fonts work and how to work with Fontographer and other programs. His own work through New Renaissance Fonts is mostly with medieval and renaissance scripts, calligraphic alphabets and ornamental capitals. Direct acess. MyFonts link for New Renaissance. David Kettlewell is a harper, renaissance musicologist and conductor to illuminate his work with text and type. Fonts free for download: AliceScrolltipRoman, AndersFancyCapitals, AndersPlainCapitals, BickhamSwashCaps, Cartouches, CelticNoadProtoype, Chiswickblack, DagmarIlluCaps, Davies-RomantiqueCaps, DaviesIlluminatedcapitals, DaviesRoundhand, DaviesSapphire, DeBeauChesneRoman, FantasiaCaps, GothicCaps, KarinsFreeLombardyCaps (2006, with Karin Skoglund), KingRichard2Caps, Kurbits3, Lettreornee, LubnaCaps, NesbittDecoratedCaps-Medium, RicksClassicItalic, RicksDecoratedUncial-Medium, RicksFolkloreRoman, RicksRelaxedHand-Italic, Samuel, SevilliaDancingText, Sevilliastandingtext, Sevilliatiles, ShawDecoratedInitials1, ShawDecoratedInitials4-Medium, Taliente-IlluCaps, WestminsterMemorialBrasses-Medium. Other fonts (some no longer available or shown): Soest St. Mary (2006, decorative capitals from embroidery work in a German church), Kurbits, Samuel, Celtic Noad, Dagmar IlluCaps, Lettre ornée, Phalesiodecor (medieval caps, 1998), American Uncial (adaptation of a URW font), FinalRomanfat or FatRoman50 (adaptation of an RWE font), Marshall (made from an 1822 parchment). Some fonts are developed in conjunction with Richard Bradley. Others involved more loosely include Adam Twardoch, Karin Skoglund, Dagmar Varaksits and Anders Rosen. MyFonts offers fonts like Chiswick Illuminated Caps (2009, Lombardic), Alice Scrolltip, Davids Roundhand, Karins Lombardy Caps, Sevillia (2006, with Richard Bradley), and Soest St Mary. Kettlewell also runs Fontografia, a medieval and calligraphic type site featuring subpages on Ludovico Vicentino [degli Arrighi], Giovambattista Palatino, and Giovanniantonio Tagliente. He also tells us why Fontlab is so much better than Fontographer when developing fonts from scans.
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Nicolas Fabian discusses the history and impact of font editors. Many interesting comparisons and historical perspectives. Fabian died in April 2006.
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Noah PostScript Type 1 Font Editor
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Yeah Noah's free Windows-based PostScript Type 1 font editor has been around since 2000. This editor is based on code changing, not mouse dragging. It gives a lot of control to the user, and with a bit of a coding mindset this can be a wonderful tool. Alternate URL. Yeah's first font is Existence Light (2004, OpenType), a monoline sans. He also made the octagonal face Trivial (2008). Yet another URL.
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OTEdit is a free opentype font editor for Windows and Mac. Page in Japanese.
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Seems to be an outline (font?) editor for Windows. Page in Japanese. By Nihon Data Control Company.
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The main digital type foundry from Russia. It also develops and distributes font oriented and localization software. Products include FastFont, a simple TrueType builder, ParaNoise, a builder for PostScript fonts with random contours, FontLab, a universal font editor and ScanFont, a font editor with scanning module. Random, customized fonts. Multilingual fonts including, Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, Greek, Georgian and Hebrew fonts for Macintosh and Windows. Catalog. Designers. Alternate URL. In the ParaType Store, you can buy Academy, Pragmatica, Newton, Courier, Futura, Petersburg, Jakob, ITC Studio Script, ITC Zapf Chancery, Karolla, Inform, Hafiz (Arabic), Kolheti (Georgian), Benzion (Hebrew). Most are Unicode fonts. Free ParaType fonts include Courier Cyrillic, Pushkin (handwriting font), and a complete font set for Cyrillic (KOI8, DOS, ISO8859-5 and Mac encodings). Type designers include Vladimir Yefimov, Tagir Safayev, Lyubov Kuznetsova, Manvel Schmavonyan and Alexander Tarbeev. The history of the foundry as told by MyFonts: "ParaType was established as a font department of ParaGraph International in 1989 in Moscow, Russia. At that time in the Soviet Union all typeface development was concentrated in one rather small group which belonged to a state research institute, Polygraphmash. It had the most complete and in fact the only one collection of Cyrillic typefaces. The collection included revivals of Cyrillic typefaces developed by Berthold and Lehmann type foundries established at the end of 19th century in St. Petersburg and artworks of Vadim Lazurski, Galina Bannikova, Nikolay Kudryashov and other masters of type and graphic design of Soviet time. ParaType became the first privately-owned type foundry in many years. A license agreement with Polygraphmash allows ParaType to manufacture and distribute their typefaces. Most of Polygraphmash staff designers soon moved to ParaType. In the beginning of 1998 ParaType was separated from the parent company and established two companies: ParaType Inc. in California and ParaType, Ltd. in Russia that inherited typefaces and font software from ParaGraph. Both companies are directed by Emil Yakupov, former head of the font department of ParaGraph. The main directions of ParaType design are: i) new original typefaces for the Russian design and publishing community; ii) revivals of historical Russian typefaces; iii) Cyrillic extensions of the best of Latin typefaces." They continue with this description of the 370+ library: " The Russian constructivist and avant garde movements of the early 20th century inspired many ParaType typefaces, including Rodchenko, Quadrat Grotesk, Ariergard, Unovis, Tauern, Dublon and Stroganov. The ParaType library also includes many excellent book and newspaper typefaces such as Octava, Lazurski, Bannikova, Neva or Petersburg. On the other hand, if you need a pretty face to knock your clients dead, meet the ParaType girls: Tatiana, Betina, Hortensia, Irina, Liana, Nataliscript, Nina, Olga and Vesna (also check Zhikharev who is not a girl but still very pretty). ParaType also excels in adding Cyrillic characters to existing Latin typefaces -- if your company is ever going to do business with Eastern Europe, you should make them part of your corporate identity! ParaType created CE and Cyrillic versions of popular typefaces licensed from other foundries, including Bell Gothic, Caslon, English 157, Futura, Original Garamond, Gothic 725, Humanist 531, Kis, Raleigh, and Zapf Elliptical 711."
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George Williams' free Open Source UNIX-based font editor for type 1 and truetype fonts. Also does truetype collections (TTC) and opentype fonts. Note that PFAedit can be used to do all conversions between all formats (type 1, truetype; PC, UNIX and Mac): it's a formidable tool. In 2004, Pfaedit was renamed FontForge.
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Commercial Russian software for making pixel fonts from truetype and type 1 fonts. Windows only.
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Cornu-spiral based curve editor by Raph Levien. For UNIX only. Discussion. Spiro is the name of the (free) toolkit. Now also available for Mac OS X. Discussion and examples. TYouTube video of letter design using a combination of Inkscape and Spiro. Inkscape can output "ai" files, which can be used as input in FontForge or FontLab.
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This page has free downloads of the Adobe OpenType Converter (type 1 to OpenType), Bitmap Font Writer, Bmap2AFM (for Mac), and Mike Gibbard's character replacement utility, Characteristica. This page carries the free type 1 editor Noah, the free truetype font editor, Softy, and the utilities Unicode Viewer and The Font Thing.
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"ptkfonted is a BDF (the common X11 screen font format) font editor written in Perl/Tk. It is capable of modifying existing bdf fonts, or creating new ones from scratch. Several sample fonts are included." Free utility by Jason Reed.
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The world's leading typography tool outfit. Makers of the T1/TTF font editor FontLab3 and 4 (Mac, PC), FONmaker (create bitmap fonts from truetype or T1, for PCs), TransType (conversion from PC to Mac and vice versa), Scanfont 3.13 (from scanned glyphs to font), TypeTool (cheapo truetype font editor), FLcomposer (edit CJKV and unicode fonts), EuroFonter (adds Euro symbol to truetype fonts), Sigmaker (signature into truetype font), Compocompiler (composite fonts and templates). Alternate site. Excellent customer support.
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A program that allows one to build fonts up from multilines and concentric circles. It is an editor for this sort of look. The software is written in "Processing" (www.processing.org), a language and development environment designed to make visual software development simple and easy to learn. Concept by Hudson-Powell, and implemented by Julien Gachadoat, Michael Chang, Brian Cort and Michael Zancan.
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Font software specialist who has written several free font editors such as MEEK 4.0 and FontStruct, both on-line truetype font generators. He is based in Berlin. At Designer Shock in Berlin, ca. 2001, he made the erasure fonts DSHomeBack, DSHomeFront, DSHomeSide, DSHomeTop (2001). At Meek FM, he presents a typographic synthesizer. His fontStruct creations are mostly pixelish: Robby Meeky, floorplan, Johann, Johann Skinny, Johann Small (2008, all fat rounded sans faces), logo (a horizontal stencil face), low_orbit, low_orbit_super_pixel, minimeek_1, Modular Nouveau No. 2 (2008), minimeek_extended, nouveau_modular, plain, sharp, snipped_1, the_first_dot_clone, the_first_fontstruction, tuning_fork.
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Developed by Letterror, RoboFab is a library of code and objects written in python for all Python-supported platforms (MacOS X and 9, Windows, Linux, etc). RoboFab is a toolkit for font and glyph data. It works together with FontTools and FontLab, but it can be used seperately. The basic version is free. " The toolkit offers a new and improved approach to working with type development projects, and it implements a brand new XML-based font data source file format called Unified Font Objects (UFO). This enables easy exchange of font source data between applications, it stores Cubic ("PostScript") as well Quadratic ("TrueType") contour data and it is application and operating system independent. Individual characters from a project can be distributed, checked into databases and manipulated with standard text tools and version control software. The UFO format contains glyphs, Unicode data, metrics, kerning, names, and many forms of data – which would not normally be associated with a final font format like TrueType or PosScript. Several new tools based on RoboFab and UFO are in development, MetricsMachine, for example, is a powerful spacing and kerning editor for MacOS X making use of the development tools that ship with Apple's OS."
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A type design script language, available From Buro Petr van Blokland + Claudia Mens. Robofog, developed by Petr van Blokland with Just van Rossum and Erik van Blokland (The Netherlands) is a script program to be used with Fontographer, based on the program language Python. It enables type designers to script and pre-program their actions in Fontographer. Alternate URL.
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Free copies of Fontographer, Photoshop 4 and 5.
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Gone. It used to have these font utilities: 30.07Advancedfontsv, Font Creator, Font Doctor, Font Reserve v2.6, Font Wrangler v2.0j, FontAgent9, FontExpert 2004 v6.0, FontExpert2004, FontRenamer122, Font_Xplorer_Lite, Fontlab Transtype v2, Suitcase, X-Fonter, Fontographer, Safefont.
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Scanahand
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Commercial Windows font software that turns scanned handwritten letters into a font. By Erwin Denissen, the author of FontCreator. Free demo.
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Comments by Pritchard: From Pyrus at about 200 dollars. Will import data from a scanner and autotrace to convert to characters in a font: has basic editing tools for cleaning up images and adjusting the characters, etc. The results are surprisingly good, and this provides a short cut to getting useable characters which can then be fine-tuned. Could be a dangerous tool in the hands of the inexperienced, who may be tempted to let the first rough result loose on an unsuspecting world. Exports fonts in Type 1 or Truetype format. Mac and PC. Full version.
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Trial (not demo!) version of ScanFont by FontLab, Yuri Yarmola's brainchild, lets you build five TrueType or type 1 fonts. " ScanFont is a program that can turn everything printed on paper or painted in computer program to a TrueType or Type 1 font. It does most of job automatically: from selection of images to autotracing, autohinting, autokerning and finally font generation. ScanFont includes both bitmap and outline editors."
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A font editor written by Gerhard Mörth (PAW Software). It is quite likely that this product was called FontCreator (not to be confused with the editor by that name from High Logic) and Polices Studio (at Micro Applications). The same people wrote MyHandwriting and MyHandwriting2, commercialized by Data Becker.
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Sergey Menshikov's (commercial) font editor for the Palm Pilot, called Pilot Font Editor. His PALM jump page is great.
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Serial numbers for most font editors and font managers.
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Reportedly has a ScanFont crack.
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SFD |
This is the universal spline font description format pioneered by George Williams at FontForge. It can be edited with a text editor.
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SimpleFont
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Commercial standalone pixel font editor (49 Euros) for Microsoft Windows. The output is in truetype. Published in 2006, the development by Program Produkt, a company founded in 1988, started in 2003. Developers: Peter Hermann, Istvan Jozsa, Laszlo Grad. Free sample fonts by Istvan Jozsa include Uncondensed (2006), StarDust (2006) and AntShit (2006).
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Softy is a free truetype font editor for Windows written by the late David J. Emmett. The program resided here for a long time, but that site, managed by Dave's wife, L. Emmett, seems to have gone, and was replaced by the new URL at MASSMind, where one can also request updates past the latest version, 1.07b that provide enhancements and bug fixes. Alternate URL. This 25USD shareware truetype and bitmap font editor has all the basic tools necessary for both modifying an existing font and creating one from scratch. Among them glyph and contour copying and mapping, inserting points to curves, changing straight lines to curves, and changing font characteristics. It can also edit/generate fonts with characters with the unicode numbers higher than the basic western Latin table. System: Windows 3.x or Win95. Bitmaps supported: windows FON, FNT, LaserJet SFP, SFL. Download sites: 1, 2, 3 (version 1.05!!!), 4, 5, 6. Tutorials: Grumpy, BTTF, Angela Cable from Rock Springs, WY. OK, if no link works, try this and consult this help page.
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Spif is intended to be an editor of outline fonts for Unix and X. At present it will load and display Adobe Type 1 font format (ascii) files. The outlines displayed may be edited but cannot be saved at present. By James Matthew Farrow at the CS Department of Basser University in Sydney, Australia.
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Developed by Erik van Blokland in 2003-2004, and first shown at ATypI in Prague in 2004, Superpolator is a flexible tool for interpolating fonts and glyphs with extreme flexibility in design space topology. Superpolator is a python package, based on RoboFab. The package contains scripts for use in FontLab (with vfb fonts) and for use with UFO-style fonts. Superpolator2 (2007) is its commercial version at 250 Euros per license.
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Fantastic Spanish on-line course on type design. The section on optical effects is excellent--a must read.
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GNU General Public License program by Curvesoft Inc., released on Feb 2 1999: TclFont is technology for creation, display and printing of scalable _stroke_ fonts defined as TCL scripts. It consists of 4 parts: (a) A sample stroke font named 'Pencil' where each glyph is defined by a small TCL procedure. Two types of strokes are currently supported: straight lines and conic curves. Pencil includes almost all the ISO-8859 glyphs with the exception of a couple of ligatures. The design is Courier-like though variable width. (b) A set of C++ files which allow stroke fonts to be arbitrarily scaled and displayed on the screen. The pen diameter can also be varied. (c) A set of TCL procedures for creating a downloadable scalable PostScript Type 3 font from a stroke font (currently this requires at least a Level 2 RIP since it uses the 'strokeadjust' operator to keep stroke widths uniform). (d) A set of TCL procedures for a large size display of single glyphs (this is useful when creating new glyphs).
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Font creation tutorial by "Chank".
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This Vietnamese site has Fontographer 4.1, Font Navigator, Font Creator, Font Finder and Font Lister.
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PDF files of Stephen Moye's book Type by Design - The Art and Science of Digital Typeface Design.
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Tom Murphy's tutorial on how to make fonts with Photoshop and Fontographer 4.1.
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Freeware DOS bitmap font editor. By by Jouni Miettunen.
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A discussion and listing of the main font creation and font management tools in 2009.
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TrueTeX, Richard Kinch's a professional implementation of the TeX typesetting system for Windows and ttf_edit, a TrueType font table editor, available for free during a limited time to persons willing to serve as beta testers. Also includes the "joincode" filter. 6994 Pebble Beach Court, Lake Worth FL 33467.
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TTEdit is a free truetype font editor for Windows. Page in Japanese. From the same people, Handfont (for handwriting generation), OTEdit (OpenType font editor for Windows), and font utilities. Alternate URL.
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A TrueType font table editor (remove glyphs, change names, etc.), part of TrueTeX, Richard Kinch's a professional implementation of the TeX typesetting system for Windows. For a while, ttf_edit was available for free to persons willing to serve as beta testers. 6994 Pebble Beach Court, Lake Worth FL 33467. Richard is one of the most helpful, thoughtful and informed people in the font software business. You'll like working with him on your problem(s).
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A free truetype modifier program being developed by George Williams, the author of pfaedit, the free truetype font editor. It is a companion program to take an existing TrueType (OpenType, TrueType Collection) file and allow you to edit some of the tables, especially the hinting table.
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CR8type for Windows is a commercial Windows truetype font editor written by Allan Murray. Free demo. Also, CR8tracer is a freeware utility based on Peter Selinger's 'Potrace' to convert bitmap images into monochrome vector formats. Combine with CR8type 2.0 to create fonts from scanned images of signatures, handwriting etc. Windows only. Type 2.2 can edit PostScript and OpenType fonts and has a knife and freehand drawing tool.
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Superb discussion of type creation tools by Nicholas Fabian. Includes Metafont, Ikarus, Fontographer, FontStudio, and FontLab.
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Manfred Albracht's font creation program that allows type 1 to truetype conversions. DS Design, 1157 Executive Circle, Suite D., Cary, NC 27511, USA. Alternate link. You can also buy ScanFont, FontExpert, SigMaker, TypeTool, FontLab. Also, custom font design.
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Wonderful essay by Nicolas Fabian about the history of font editors and font creation systems.
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A "basic" font editor from Pyrus available for 99 US dollars. Can edit both Type 1 and Truetype, and will preserve all the data (such as hinting) in Truetype fonts for characters which are not edited.
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A new TrueType font editor by Marco Cocco. Dead link.
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Simple font editor for Windows.
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Type archive with over 6000 free fonts and thousands of links to commercial fonts. Many pages on typography. Glossary. Articles. Type books. Foreign language archive covering all Indic languages, Tibetan, Thai, Lao and all European languages. Dingbat archive. Font applications and editors. TV and movie fonts.
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TypePhases (was: vigital tipografia)
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Joan Marti Mas' dingbats and fonts. Joan Mas is a Catalan typographer/designer, who offers free and commercial fonts. Free: Cu-tbo-rough (2004, handwriting), Dalicanya (2004), Pero Jefe (2004), Corbatins (2004), Cartelia (2004), Carusses (heads), Ataques, Scroonge (grunge), Tooman (tribal dingbats), Kinky Boots (2004), Viatge Quimic (2004, psychedelic face), Kool Aid Acid Text (2004), CU-TBO (2004, comic book family), Psychopaths (2002), CapsBats (2002), Plantiya (1999), Illustries (2000), Amano (handwriting, 2000), DeskSpace dingbats, Bruegheliana, Fazzes, Whimsies, Ombres, Defora (grunge), Antypepatics (great facial caricatures, some even Picasso-esque), Honcho, Ataques, Taques au gogo, Scroonge, Lletraparits, Collbats (named after the cartoon artist Josep Coll, 1924-1984), Homoningos (2002-2004, human figures), Viatge Quimic (2002, lettering based on ideas of Austrian designer Alfred Roller from the early 20th century), Mandicho (child's hand), Sinky (comic book), Tipejos (human figure outlines), Embrush. Commercial fonts: Genteta I, II and III, Absurdies (mad men dingbats), The Joy of Reading, Fontorio (handwriting), Simpa (handwriting), Entestats (2004, dingbats of heads), Incipials 1, Deaf Crab, Racana, Emplomada, Phalopha, Feedback, DaMarka, Bizarries, Brrrush, Threedee, Capsbats 1,2&3 (very original: human heads with things in them), Manualita (handwriting), Ombres 2&3. He (note: Joan is a man's name in Catalonia) also has a sub-page on font creation and typography. Type links. An excellent font-making tutorial.
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FontLab-based font editor (TTF and type 1) for Mac and PC.
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Typism
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Typism is Juraj Sukop's web-based font editor published in 2009: It is a public site where anyone can create a font for others to use and to study, to modify and to copy. You write the description of a typeface, design the outlines of a glyph, track the development history and publish any revision in human-readable format to store locally. All it takes to run it is a browser supporting a few open standards. [...] I believe it is of uttermost importance that everyone has the unrestricted access to the tools one needs to create freely. Therefore everyone can come here and may do good and that is why typism uses SVG. All the code and fonts are released under MIT License and Open Font License, respectively. [...] In other words, typism borrows heavily from Blender, Firefox, Wikipedia and The Pirate Bay. Juraj was an exchange student at UIAH in Helsinki, and got support for this project from the Slovak government.
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Typographics Ltd
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Jerusalem-based company headed by designer and font software developer Jakob Gonczarowski. Jakob also wrote (and is now selling) an X-Windows font editor for SUN machines (soon for Linux machines as well). Jakob also made many of the present Hebrew faces.
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A few Celtic truetype fonts at the Faculty of Celtic Studies of the University College Cork. The font collection, GAELA, GAELAW, GAELAX, GAELAXW, GAELB, GAELBW, GAELBX, GAELBXW, shows the following copyright line: TTGL/TTASM (C) F.M. O'Carroll Aberystwyth 1997. The page also has truetype executables such as TTASM, TTBIT, TTGL, TTVIEW, all truetype font utilities allowing even a limited amount of truetype font editing on DOS (not Windows).
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A free on-line raster image to vector image tool published in 2007. Input: JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFF. Output: EPS, SVG, PNG. Based on a Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Laboratory research project by James Diebel and Jacob Norda. In principle, one should be able to use it for converting scanned images to fonts by importing the EPS or SVG files into FontForge or other tools. I can see this as a nice free alternative to ScanFont for making glyphs out of complicated scanned images. The only downside for now is that the tool is on-line and a bit slow. But the quality of the generated output is excellent.
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Rolling Rock Software's free routine for creating fonts while working in AutoCAD.
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VS Software in Little Rock, AR, offers these products and services: signature/logo font making, Jet True (TrueType to PCL font converter for 325 USD), barcode and MICR fonts, FontGen v1 (300 USD: bitmap font editor, 7 formats). About FontGen: FontGen's most common format is a 300 or 600 dpi PCL 5 bitmap font for use with the PCL driver of an HP or compatible laser printer.
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Bitstream's 200USD product (free demo) for making .pfr fonts for use with trueDoc (dynamic fonts in Netscape). Comes with 200 truetype fonts. PC and Mac.
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Mark van den Brink's software includes a small free trueType font editor (TrueType Font Editor V1.2), the TrueType Font Library for the Borland Graphic Interface.
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Daniel Dardailler's bdf/xbm/xpm/mouse editor. Free. Version 5.0.1.
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Edits BDF fonts on X-Windows (simple ASCII representation of bitmap fonts) and can import Linux console fonts, Sun VF fonts, X bitmap, Linux console fonts (PSF, CP, FNT), metafont PK/GF, Windows FON/FNT fonts, TrueType fonts, and HBF (Han bitmap fonts. It exports PSF fonts if necessary. Developed and freely made available by Mark Leisher, Computing Research Lab, New Mexico State University, Box 30001, Dept. 3CRL, Las Cruces, NM 88003, USA. FTP access.
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Zoltan Toth's company sells Autofont, an editor for AutoCAD fonts.
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Luc Devroye 
The first step in font design can be Adobe Illustrator. One can take 
Launched at the end of August 2009 by Håkon Bertheussen, this is a truly free font generation service---the users own the generated fonts, and there are no commercial interests behind the scenes. Some minor improvements are being implemented. It looks and feels like the popular YourFonts, which is no longer free. Håkon Bertheussen is a design engineer at Atmel, Trondheim, Norway. He runs 