I've the coordinates of the letters (e.g. using SVG). How could I generate a TrueType/PostScript font for my computer ?
(edited : changed vectorial to TrueType/PostScript )
+2
A:
The canonical font editing tools are Fontographer and Ikarus (now part of Fontmaster). There are also some free tools. The spec for Adobe Type 1 fonts can be found here and the OpenType specification can be found Here.
Designing a font that works well is not a trivial undertaking; fonts make use of quite a lot of optical tricks to make them look balanced. Some key ones are:
Some letters will be slightly higher than others to avoid leaving the appearance of them being uneven. For example, a capital 'A' or 'O' might be slightly higher than a capital 'I' because it is necessary to do this so the heights look even. You may need to fiddle the outlines slightly if you haven't already done so.
Hinting gives the rasteriser additional information to make sure things that should be the same width are rendered as such. There are various tutorials available that discuss the basics and some books on the subject.
Lastly, you need to sort out the letterspacing and kerning pairs. If your typeface is display-only this is less important as you can always manually kern the type. If you want to set bodies of text in it you will have to address this otherwise the text will look very rough.
This is not a trivial task because of the number of combinations that need to be done. Historically, this was a large proportion - often 80% or more - of the total effort in building the font. There are tutorials on the web and quite a few typeface design books on the market that go into this in some detail. You might also want to pick apart the kerning pair data on other fonts (this can be found in the associated font metrics files) and see what others have done.
ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells
2009-02-08 23:03:28