Chris Sells asked how I created the handwriting font I use so often. It’s quite simple, just a bit tedious.

Font creation/editing programs range from free to $350 for Macromedia Fontographer and $550 for FontLab.

I chose High Logic’s Font Creator. It’s around $50 and offered far more features and functionality than I will ever need. It’s stable and simple to use. The UI is basically a set of boxes for all the possible glyphs that make up a font. There can be a lot of glyphs if you decide to create upper/lower case, italics, bold, special symbols, etc.

I chose to create a block letter font, uppercase only with numbers and a handful of special symbols I use most frequently.

This process would be simpler if I used a tablet, but I wanted to capture the feel of pen on paper (ok, I don’t have a tablet).

So…

Write out the characters you want in your font

Scan at a high resolution 300dpi or greater

Cut and paste characters into separate files

Import these files into the appropriate boxes in Font Creator

Preview and tweak, preview and tweak, preview and tweak

Most of the tweaking is to get consistent sizing and spacing.

Voila!