A Brief Guide to Creating Fonts
Well, this is how I do it, anyway...
If you want to make your own fonts, there is a company that makes a small suite of affordable products called "High Logic".
Here is their website:
www.high-logic.com/font-generator/scanahand
The product I use is 'Scanahand'. You draw the letters on a grid and run it through the process - hey, presto! You have a new font! Well, that's the short version, anyway. There's a free trial, by the way.
Now, you can print out the templates (on paper), draw the letters using pencil, pen, whatever and then scan them. What I do is use my wacom-enabled tablet and draw them digitally; that way, I don't have to worry about eraser marks, smudges, etc. Also, scanning doesn't always produce a 'straight' image.
Scanahand comes with several default templates, but I have included four images that I use as templates. They are tiffs and they *should* have a transparent layer on top, but that might depend on your art software. I use SketchBookPro (by Autodesk) for drawing the letters. I have *just* learned that it is now available for free!
https://sketchbook.com/
Now, you also have to tell Scanahand which letter is in which box. That is accomplished by the mapping template, which is the .xml file that I've included.
So, you've created your font and you want to share it. I, personally, have no delusion that anyone would pay me one, red cent for my fonts, so instead of a copyright, I have a copyleft, which is in the text file. However, that's just *my* version. If you want to do something slightly different, go to:
Creative Commons Organization
Please note that part of the license says that if you use *my* fonts, even if you change them, you *must* use the same license parts.
Now, to ingrain that license information into your .ttf, you need to change the properties and that is no small task. There are other, more complex, ways of doing that, but I found this little gem makes it rather easy:
Font Properties Editor
For your convenience, I have included a copy of the installation file (which is fpeditR.exe), in case the link is dead or you just don't feel like downloading it.
Alternatively, you can install WOW64Menu WOW64menu,
but that gets *really* complicated because you also have to install TTFExtNT.dll (32-bit) and "run regsvr32 TTFExtNT.dll". WAY too much effort! Personally, I think fpeditR does a better job anyway.
Now, if you're thinking that you might want to do a lot of fonts, you can register as a "foundry". This can be done on lots of websites, but I use this one:
Microsoft Typography Vendors
If you scroll down a little, you can find "GRIM" which is my ID for Legacy Publishing.
Have fun!
/Grim