Fonts Editors

Fonts are they "spice" to any word document. They are the very essence of the documents which make it presentable or attractive. Some people spend a lot of time choosing the right type of fonts, the "appropriate" ones.  Font usage is not restricted to documentations. The usage of designer, or as we

1.     What is Font Editor?

2.     FontoGrapher
3.     FontCreator
4.     FontForge
5.     Scanahand

6.     Raster Font Editor

7.     FontStruct  

A font editor is a class of application software specifically designed to create or modify font files. Font editors differ greatly depending on if they are designed to edit bitmap fonts or outline fonts. Most modern font editors deal with the outline fonts. “Bitmap fonts” uses an older technology and are most commonly used in console applications.

            The bitmap font editors were usually very specialized, as each computing platform had its own font format. One subcategory of bitmap fonts is text mode fonts. Creating fonts that image your text data requires knowledge of font tools, Unicode, languages and their shaping behaviors, and of font formats. The most obvious aspect is that it is a drawing program like FreeHand, Inkscape or Illustrator which lets you draw the outlines of your letters. Unlike other drawing progams it expects you to draw many pictures at once (one or more for each letter) and collects them into a database. It allows you to describe the way these pictures interact with each other (if you put one picture after the other then they should normally be separated by a certain distance -- the font's metrics, or if these two pictures are placed adjacent to one another then they turn into a third -- the font's ligatures, and so on).

Finally a font editor will bundle up all the pictures you have drawn, and all the metadata about how those pictures fit together, and will turn that bundle of stuff into a font that your computer can use to display text.

Examples of font editors are:

Free Software

ü  BirdFont

ü  FontForge

Proprietary software

ü DTL

ü FontMaster

ü FontArk

ü FontCreator

ü FontLab Studio

ü Fontographer

ü Glyphs

ü Ikarus 

FONTOGRAPHER

With Fontographer, it is easy to design new typefaces and to customize existing fonts, and the result will be high-quality fonts that can reliably work across different operating systems.

ü Create new fonts

ü Customize existing fonts, add extra characters

ü Fine-tune spacing and kerning

ü Fix problems in bad fonts

ü Convert old fonts to a new format.

For years, Fontographer has been among the top names in font editor software. This application remains an excellent font maker and is more than capable of designing even a complex font. Beginners should avoid this product, as the user manual was written for the Mac version and therefore only partially complete. Some features of Fontographer are:

Ø  You can import vector or bitmap images to create a new font from scratch, or you can create a new font by blending two existing fonts into one. We especially like that you can choose the blend percentage. For example, you can use 30% of one font and 70% of another, or you can split them 50/50.
Ø  Creating composite glyphs is quite simple, too, thanks to the easy copy-and-paste functionality. There are a few extra steps needed to fine-tune your composite glyph, but they are hardly rocket science and should be a snap for anyone who knows what they’re doing.

Ø  Basic drawing tools are well represented in this font creator, though the advanced tools leave a bit to be desired and there are no vector paint tools to speak of. We found that you can create a corner, tangent, curve or point in your glyph, and you can add shapes like a polygon, rectangle or ellipse. There is also a calligraphic pen for drawing your own calligraphy-style strokes. You can also add nodes, or points, on the outline so you can make the most miniscule of adjustments.
Ø  The one advanced tool that really stands out is the perspective tool, which allows you to rotate a glyph on a 3D plane. That is, you can rotate it along the x, y or z axis for a unique visual effect. No other font editor we reviewed had this function.
Ø  Batch transformation is achieved by holding the Shift or Control keys when selecting glyphs, but the available functions are limited to skew, scale, mirror flip and shift. Guidelines will help you achieve consistent results with these and all other edits.

Ø  Manual and automatic hinting are available, so you have the option to choose between getting nitty-gritty or letting the font generator do the work for you. The same goes for kerning: You can adjust kerning pairs yourself, or let the computer adjust all the common pairs for you. The font creator also has automated bitmap tracing, which converts a bitmap glyph to outlines so it can be saved as an outline font.
Ø  You can change certain features of an entire font at once, as we mentioned, and you can also make changes to the font’s family and style names, as well as its copyright and author information. This font editor even has a handy “change weight” function that will make a font more or less bold with just a few clicks. The three different windows – the font window, the glyph editor and the metrics window – can all be opened, closed, minimized or resized as needed, so everything is where you want it and nothing is getting in your way.
The only feature the software is actually missing is the ability to fully test fonts before exporting and installing them.                          

Fontographer edits all the various font formats, and saves fonts in all the outline formats available. You can even save a font as an Adobe Illustrator EPS file, so the individual glyphs can be adjusted more finely in the Illustrator application. Drawing tools are not labeled, but the icons are familiar. And if you’re really unsure about what a button does, just hover your mouse over it and the name of the tool will appear. These tools appear in their own window, which can be opened or moved as needed. Likewise, the layers panel can be closed or moved if it’s in the way. This panel lets you turn outlines, templates, guidelines and hints on or off, so you see only what you want to see when editing glyphs.

FONTCREATOR

With over 4.5 million downloads to date, FontCreator is the world's most popular font editor. An advanced feature set makes it the tool of choice for professionals, and its intuitive interface is straightforward enough for users at any expertise level. Create your own fonts, redesign existing characters, edit the spacing in font sets, and much more.            

When you create or open a font, FontCreator displays an overview of all available characters. You can simply add missing characters, or select an existing character, and modify its appearance. You can import (scanned) images of your signature or company logo, or make a font from your own handwriting. With FontCreator you can also fix character code points, font names, kerning pairs, and at all times you can preview your fonts before installing.

Runs On: Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8 (32/64 bit)

Scalable color fonts

FontCreator is the first font editor to support the new scalable color fonts extension. This new feature allows you to create multi-colored glyphs for systems that support it, while maintaining backwards compatibility for systems that do not. Watch the video above for a quick introduction on how to create color fonts with FontCreator.

Font overview with categories

The glyph and character category panel gives you quick and easy access to the glyphs, character subsets and Unicode ranges.

Design high quality fonts

The standard and professional edition include font validation features which enable you to improve the quality of your fonts by locating and solving common glyph problems.

Optical Metrics

The Optical metrics feature in the professional edition simplifies one of the most complex and time consuming tasks in font design. It analyzes a set of most common characters to find the best left and right side bearings of each of these glyphs.

Kerning

Manually add kerning to your font or let the Autokerning wizard take care of kerning for you in the standard and professional edition.

Import images and Vector graphics

Import (scanned) images or Vector graphics and convert them into glyphs. Create your own handwriting font by scanning your handwriting and import it into FontCreator.

Complete composites

The standard and professional edition allows intelligent generation of outlines for more than 2,200 (mostly accented) composite characters.

Easily rename fonts

On the font properties dialog you can view and edit the font name, legal and copyright information, embedding rights and more.

OpenType Layout Features made easy

Common OpenType layout features are automatically added to your fonts and with the standard and professional editions you can take full control over these features through custom scripts.

FONTFORGE

FontForge is an outline font editor that lets you create your own postscript, truetype, opentype, cid-keyed, multi-master, cff, svg and bitmap (bdf, FON, NFNT) fonts, or edit existing ones. Also lets you convert one format to another. FontForge has support for many Macintosh font formats. It is a full-featured font editor which supports all common font formats. Developed primarily by George Williams, FontForge is free software and is distributed under the 3-clause BSD license. It is available for several operating systems (including Linux, Windows) and Mac OS X and is localized into 12 languages.Features of FontForge are:

ü FontForge is an extremely powerful software system offering practically all the features of FontLab, together with some unique and often revolutionary features of its own.

ü To facilitate automated format conversion and other repetitive tasks, FontForge implements two scripting languages: its own language and Python. FontForge can run scripts from its GUI, from the command line, and also offers its features as a Python module so it can be integrated into any Python program.

ü  FontForge supports Adobe's OpenType feature file specification. It also supports the unofficial Microsoft mathematical typesetting extensions introduced for Cambria Math and supported by Office 2007, XeTeX and LuaTeX. At least one free OpenType mathematical font has been developed in FontForge.

ü FontForge uses FreeType for rendering fonts on screen. Since the November 15, 2008 release, FontForge can use libcairo and libpango software libraries for graphics and text rendering providing anti-aliased graphics and complex text layout support.

ü FontForge can use Potrace or AutoTrace to auto trace bitmap images and import them into a font.

ü Parts of FontForge code are used by the LuaTeX typesetting engine for reading and parsing OpenType fonts.

ü The FontForge source code includes a number of utility programs in the 'font tools' directory, including 'showttf' which shows the contents of binary font files, and a WOFF converter and deconverter.

SCANAHAND

Scanahand creates fonts that you can use in Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Notepad, and any Windows application. You can even load your fonts on Macintosh computers. There is no limit on the number of fonts that you can make, and though you cannot edit fonts, you can edit your filled-in template with photo-editing software and generate the font again quite easily.

How does it work?

Print a template, draw all of the characters using a black marker or felt-tip pen, and scan your drawing. Scanahand will build your font, and install it on Windows, ready for you to use. You don't need to use additional graphics software, but Power Users and Hobbyists alike can use Scanahand along with their favorite graphic drawing software to create or modify each character of their font. So even without a printer and scanner you'll be able to create custom fonts.

Several templates to choose from

The standard edition includes an English and Western Europe template. The premium edition also includes a signature and symbol template and an editor to create your own templates.

Template editor

The premium edition includes a template editor that lets you define your own templates so you can decide which characters will be included in your fonts.

Scan your template

Scan your template directly from within Scanahand, or select pre-scanned images on your hard disk.

Test your font

After the font is generated you can preview and test your font. If you are satisfied with the results you can directly install the font from within Scanahand.

Generate the font

Generating the font takes only a few minutes depending on the selected template and your computer speed.

RASTER FONT EDITOR

Raster Font Editor is an easy-to-use font editor for the creation of bitmap fonts.

It supports several file formats and has a very simple yet fully customizable user interface.

The application can open font resource files (*.fnt) created by other tools such as Borland's Resource Workshop.

It can import DOS 8x16 fonts, fonts from BMP images and can convert TTF fonts to raster fonts.

You can save your raster fonts as Font Resource (*.fnt), Resource Script (*.rc), Text (*.txt) and Windows Bitmap (*.bmp).

“Saving as Text file” is useful for debugging purposes and for creating text representation of characters. It ia Windows based editor designed to allow writing extensions covering any user format of raster fonts. It supports fixed/variable character height/width, incomplete character sets, etc. It has a lot of useful character-editing functions (italicize, bold, shift,etc.).Raster font editor is an open source software that will let you perform Raster-Based tasks. It's free for both personal and commercial use, thus the perfect choice for those that want an alternative for Raster-Based programs.In order to download Raster font editor you just have to click on the Free Download button above and you'll be able to save the 0 setup on your computer. The latest version was released on 2000-10-09 and is compatible with 32-bit MS Windows (95/98). All 32-bit MS Windows (95/98/NT/2000/XP). If you have any questions about using this program, feel free to ask other users on our Software Support forum.

FONTSTRUCT

For certain projects, even the gargantuan list of pre-installed fonts on your system just won't do. When you want to create your own font but don't want to learn the archaic process for doing so, you want free font designer webapp FontStruct. FontStruct provides simple tools to color in integrated blocks. You can fill out just one key letter or a whole font, distribute your creation freely or with rights reserved, and offer it up as an easy-to-install TrueType font. Using FontStruct's tools requires a free sign-up—or you could just browse FontStruct's library of original fonts for download.           

          FontStruct is likely the easiest way to design and share fonts, right from within your browser, for free. Not only that but you can view and download fonts created by other designers for free as well. FontStruct is a powerful web application for creating and sharing fonts, brought to you by FontShop. Even better than the ability to create fonts directly in your browser, is the ability to do it for free! The font creation app runs in Flash so just about any flash enabled browser will work. Although the core of FontStruct is the app for creating fonts, FontStruct as a whole is more than that, extending to a full type-design community. Someone who creates fonts in FontStruct is called a FontStructor, which FontStruct says is the soul of the FontStruct community.           

Getting started creating a font is quite easy, simply clicking the FontStructor tab and entering the name of the font you would like to create. Once you click Start FontStructing, you’ll jump into the full font building application. Once you’re in, you’ll see a brief tip box telling you where to start, along with three movable panels with tools, letter selection and zoom level. As you roll over elements you’ll get small description popups to help you figure out what to do. You can set the application mode to stack within the advanced menu, which will enable you to stack different bricks together. When you stack different bricks in the grid, the bricks combined in one cell will also combine in the My Bricks panel to be able to reuse it quickly. Using the line tool will make it easy to place bricks of the selected type along a line quickly. As you can imagine, using these tools together can enable you to quickly build a custom font, that’s much easier than you might find in desktop font building apps.

          The FontStruct application and community is quite a lot of fun, particularly for those interested in designing fonts. The application was incredibly easy to use and took no time at all to get started. While I’m not personally a fan of the FontStruct interface theme (the whole site and app), it was consistent throughout, functioned perfectly and was very easy to navigate and use.

Happy Styling!

References:

http://web.appstorm.net/tag/fontstruct/

http://www.webutations.org/go/review/fontstruct.com

http://font-editor-software-review.toptenreviews.com/

http://font-editor-software-review.toptenreviews.com/

http://www.cylog.org/graphics/rasterfonteditor.jsp

http://www.fontlab.com/font-editor/fontographer/

http://fontforge.org/overview.html#TOC

https://developer.apple.com/fonts/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fontographer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FontLab