Create your own fonts

Many of the friends who do plane may have had such an experience: in their own works to use a special effect font, but everywhere can not find to meet their own requirements. So some friends chose to draw their own, which of course solved the problem at that time, but have you ever thought of making your character graphics into a real sense, can be used in Windows system fonts? Perhaps you would think that this is a professional software company, personal production is not too difficult?

In fact, as long as we choose a good tool, master methods, making their own fonts is not difficult.

First, the basic knowledge of the font

Usually our common font format mainly has the following kinds:

1. Raster fonts (. FON)

This font is a bitmap that is stored at different sizes for a specific display resolution, and is used for displaying text on a screen in a Windows system, such as menus, buttons, and so on. It is not described as a vector, the magnification will appear sawtooth, only suitable for screen description. However, it is displayed very quickly, so it is used as a system font in Windows.

2. Vector fonts (. FON)

Although the extension is the same as the raster font, but the font is defined by a vector based mathematical model and is a type of Windows system font, some Windows applications automatically use vector fonts to replace the display of raster fonts in larger screen displays.

3.PostScript font (. PFM)

This font is based on a description of another vector language (Adobe PostScript) and is commonly used in PostScript printers, but Windows does not directly support this type of font, and you need to install Adobe Type Manger for Windows to use this type of font ( ATM) software for coordination.

4.TrueType font (. TTF)

This is one of the most exposed types of fonts in our day-to-day operations, and its greatest feature is that it is a contour based font defined by a mathematical model, which makes them easier to handle than vector based fonts, guaranteeing the consistency of the screen and print output. At the same time, this type of font and vector fonts can be arbitrarily scaled, rotated without fear of the occurrence of jagged. The font we're going to make here belongs to this type.

A complete TTF font is composed of basic Latin (letter-A-Z case, common notation), extended Latin (phonetic, phonetic notation), graphical symbols, control symbols, and many other parts, but we can make fonts that contain only the basic Latin area. We need to use two software: CorelDraw, Font Creator program. Let's start with the font creation.

Second, make your own fonts

The first step is to finish the character drawing with CorelDRAW

I believe that for every friend who is engaged in graphic design, CorelDRAW should be very familiar with it. There are two main reasons to use it to draw a font: First, the CorelDRAW graphics are very powerful, drawing complex shapes easily; second, in the same software CorelDRAW is the only one by one directly support Truetupe (. TTF) output.

Attention! The default installation for CORELDRAW10 is not included in TTF output support, you will need to select Custom installation at installation, and the TTF font/ttf is selected in the vector file format in export file type. But to the latest CORELDRAW11, the feature is gone. Below I take the current commonly used CORELDRAW10 as an example, tells the use CorelDRAW output font method.

1. Start CorelDRAW, draw out the graphics to be a font (this omits the specific drawing process, the specific drawing method can refer to other related tutorials and books or visit the pole design online coreldraw column ).

2. Objects that will be used as a single character are combined into a single object using welding or combination tools. This is important because CorelDRAW export a Font object can only export a single object at a time, otherwise it prompts "too many objects" and cannot be exported. Sometimes combining character objects may not get the results we want, which should be considered when you start drawing.

3. When you have finished combining all the objects, select one of the objects you want to use as characters (where you select lowercase "a"), click "File"-"Export" or press the shortcut key "Ctrl+e" directly. The Export dialog box pops up, select Ttf-ttf font file in the file type, enter the name of the font file you want to export in the file name, and make sure that you are hooked before the only selected item in the lower-right check box.