Fontforge import image12/19/2023 ![]() ![]() You’ll need to fiddle with (auto)spacing, set up some kerning tables, set the font name (in Element→Font Info … – and you’ll probably want to set the em scale to 1024, as TrueType fonts like powers of two), then File→Generate Fonts. You’ll see your characters appear in the main window. Select Edit→Select→All, then Element→Autotrace.Point it at the first of the image tiles (uni0020.png), and Import. Now File→Import…, and use Image Template as the format. This should result in a bunch of files called uniNNNN.png in the current folder, like these:.If you miss out the call to the shell, it will just print out the commands it would have run to create the character tiles. You might want to put a new font in a new folder, as the next stage creates lots of files, and might overwrite your old work. Save the image as a Portable Bitmap (PBM).I also scale and threshold the image so I get a very dark image at 300-600dpi. Crop/rotate/skew the page so the very corners of the character grid table are at the edges of the image, like this: I find it helpful at this stage to clean off any specks/macules.You want to scan in greyscale or black and white. Scan the page, making sure the page is as straight as possible and the scanner glass is spotless.Keep well within the lines there’s nothing clever about how splits the page up. This doesn’t work very well if you use thick paper. The second page is guidelines that you can place under the page. ![]() Print at least the first page of chargrid.pdf.chargrid.pdf – the font grid template for printing.– splits up a (very particular) bitmap grid into character cells.autotrace or potrace so that FontForge can convert the scanned bitmaps to vectors.FontForge, the amazing free font editor.NetPBM, the free graphics converter toolkit.It might need Cygwin under Windows I don’t know. I wrote and tested this on a Mac (with some packages installed from DarwinPorts), but it should run on Linux. This process is a little fiddly, but all the parts are free, and it uses free software. This looks more than a bit like my handwritingīecause it is my handwriting! Sure, the spacing of the punctuation needs major work, and I could have fiddled with the baseline alignment, but it’s legible, which is more than can usually be said of my own chicken-scratch. One day I may update this post, but for now, I’m leaving it as is. There’s also some font cleanup I’d recommend, like resolving overlaps, adding extrema, and rounding points to integer. Most of the *Ports Apple software repositories have given way to Homebrew: you may have some success on Mac (untested by me) if you brew install netpbm fontforge potrace. That means that installation and run instructions may not work as well, or even at all. ![]()
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