Good Software to Make a Font?

There is new, easy, powerful AND affordable solution (disclosure: I'm one of it's creators)

Fontself Maker: a $49 extension that runs within Illustrator and Photoshop so you can just drag & drop your letters to make fonts.

Fontself has many power features (kerning, alternates, ligatures) and cool extras like OpenType-SVG color fonts, which can be based on either vector artwork or bitmap images for textured fonts.

Try Fontself Maker an Adobe AI and PS extension for edit and create a fonts.

Oops - hit the send button pre-maturely.

There are some other options.

Fontstruct - an on-line FREE font creator that works something like a

set of lego.

At the extreme high-end,

DTL FontMaster and associated tools. They have free trial versions

available (save disabled). Full version is over £2,000. That's

POUNDS, not dollars!

Both on-line services and software are available ostensibly for

converting handwriting to fonts. They do rudimentary scans from a

template into which you've placed your images (hand-drawn or via

computer) and they create a font from that. They include Fontifier,

YourFonts, Your Handwriting, and more.

Oh yes. Tom Phinney's comments about Corel Draw as a font creator may

have OVER-stated its capabilities

OK, this time I MEAN to hit the send button.

- Herb

@Thomas and @ HerbVB thank you guys so much! Yes, generally inexpensive and good are hard to come by. I just wanted to see what the process was like and not spend too much money along the way.

Thanks again!

You asked for something 'good' and also 'inexpensive'. In general, you

can't have both.

The two suggestions you've received so far include one good and

expensive solution (Fontlab) and one poor and inexpensive (Corel Draw).

Corel Draw's font creation process is absurd! It does one character at

a time and has just about zero ways to select or create any other than

a couple of default font attributes.

An exception to the rule is FontForge, which is both good and free. It

also has a steep learning curve, and requires a cygwin environment.

Somewhere in between, you can find:

Other programs from Pyrus/Fontlab, with varying costs and degrees of

capability, including TypeTool and Scanfont. Scanfont does a

reasonable job of vectorizing images of full character sets, but

should really be used in conjunction with FontLab. They also own and

sell Fontographer, an expensive old warhorse of a program that hasn't

been updated in many many years. The Mac version is a bit newer.

FontCreator (High-Logic Systems). Extremely flexible when vectorizing

images of individual glyphs. It has poor defaults (such as assigning

the copyright to High-Logic Systems and creating many hundreds of

empty glyphs) that have to be overcome. Again, post-processing with a

program like FontLab is recommended, but not necessary.

CR8 Software Solutions:

Has a free font creator, TypeLight, that has limited drawing tools,

can't import scanned images directly, and other limitations. He also

offers a paid version with significantly more capability, and a

separate program CR8Trace, for vectorizing scanned images. All in all,

not great, but you get what you pay for.

Font Lab Studio 5