Create your own TrueType fonts

[Gare]

Hi Hans—

First, welcome to the Fonts & Typography area of tg. I am not a Moderator here, and please don't take the following observation as a personal criticism or anything, because we need all the participation we can get on this area.

At the same time, however, I think that 90% of our members who are interested in getting into building their own fonts don't know where to start. And frankly, Inkscape is not the shortest route from A to Z. In fact, I found the PDF instructions to be tedious and was prone to giving up with this method. And this is something I do not want to put those who are interested in typography through—

Although it's an interesting article, this method for generating a dingbat font set (it's practically impossible to create a character-based typeface) depends almost entirely on a 3rd party conversion utility to convert an SVG file Inkscape can save. So the chain to a finished "picture font" set would be:

1. Draw your glyph set in Xara.
2. Export it to PDF.
3. Import it to Inkscape.
4. Go through 15 steps in the tutorial file you've provided a link for.
5. Go get the convertor utility to convert the SVG file to TrueType.
6. Perform the conversion.

This seems like a lot of steps only to wind up with TrueType but not OpenType, and Xara is involved in a fraction of the process.

Here's the steps I'd advise, to create a TrueType and OpenType typeface, that can contain pictures or actual characters.

1. Get a job that pays $100.
2. Buy Type Tool 3.
3. Export your characters from Xara to Illustrator file format to Type Tool.

I have nothing to do with FontLab or the company's products. I have, however, dome some research on the best feature per price on Font Editors, and Type Tool 3 is almost as feature filled as its $650 big brother, FontLab. No jive: I've been using FontLab for years and just ran Type Tool 3 through its paces yesterday before recommending it.

My Best,

Gary