Lemma Soft Forums

Hey guys!

I am wanting to make my own font from scratch from my game. I don't, though, have a scanner. Is there any online font makers available for free?

My advice would be: don't. At least, not for the main text font.

There's a lot of font snobbery that goes on amongst aficionados, but creating a nicely readable font is an intensely difficult skill. Consistency of lines, weights and shapes, kerning rules, ligatures etc. all factor into how readable a font is. Speaking from experience, rolling your own will lead to text that's hard on the eye and looks unprofessional.

For display rather than bulk text, you can get away with more. In that case it might be easier to avoid making a full font, with all the difficulties that entails, and instead make an image for each piece of display text you need. That way, you can customise the decorative elements even more, and kern everything manually.

If you're dead set on making a custom text font, I'd recommend working with an altering an existing free font to suit your purposes - making uniform alterations to things like width, ascender and descender height and so forth. I know you can do that in CorelDraw, and I imagine there are free equivalents that you can use as well.

Queex wrote:My advice would be: don't. At least, not for the main text font.

There's a lot of font snobbery that goes on amongst aficionados, but creating a nicely readable font is an intensely difficult skill. Consistency of lines, weights and shapes, kerning rules, ligatures etc. all factor into how readable a font is. Speaking from experience, rolling your own will lead to text that's hard on the eye and looks unprofessional.

For display rather than bulk text, you can get away with more. In that case it might be easier to avoid making a full font, with all the difficulties that entails, and instead make an image for each piece of display text you need. That way, you can customise the decorative elements even more, and kern everything manually.

If you're dead set on making a custom text font, I'd recommend working with an altering an existing free font to suit your purposes - making uniform alterations to things like width, ascender and descender height and so forth. I know you can do that in CorelDraw, and I imagine there are free equivalents that you can use as well.

Thanks for the advice! I am mostly worried because i don't know if the fonts windows have built in are copyrighted.

There are resources online to find 'free fonts' (although some of them are miscategorised with respect to the terms they're 'free' under).

http://www.1001freefonts.com/
http://www.dafont.com/
Plus others.

It looks like Google's free web fonts have been massively increased since I last checked:

http://www.google.com/fonts lets you browse and pick
https://code.google.com/p/googlefontdirectory/ lets you download them.

'Optimised for the web' is probably a good thing for VNs, too, as it implies they play nicely with automatic layout engines (unlike top-end print fonts) and remain readable at small sizes.

If you still want to make your own font, type "Make your own font" into Google.

Here are some results
http://www.myscriptfont.com/ (free)
http://www.yourfonts.com/ (not free)

You just have to download a template. If you have a printer and a scaner, print it, write the letters and symbols, scan it and upload to the site. You don't even have to print it, you can edit the template in the drawing program.

You can also use image fonts in Ren'Py.
http://www.renpy.org/doc/html/text.html ... ased-fonts

Hi Dylan, for the technical side of things you can use http://www.high-logic.com/font-editor/fontcreator.html. I experienced font making myself during my graphic design elective... though it kinda ended in misery. My font looked great though for horror stuff. /sarcasms.

My workflow as follows:

>Draw all characters in paper
>Scan
>Clean and Crop each character
>Assign each image of the each character to each character (uhh) in the program
>Line it there

Alternately you can draw the character directly in the program! Trial runs for 30 days but it should be enough to give you first hand experience hahaha.

To use the font you can export it to .ttf or whatever is available.

I might actually also have to create a font for my game since we have created a custom language with it's own alphabet... I think it might be easier to create a font rather than write the symbols every time I have to use it, but I might be wrong because I suspect getting the proportion and kerning right might be really, really hard.

Aviala wrote:I might actually also have to create a font for my game since we have created a custom language with it's own alphabet... I think it might be easier to create a font rather than write the symbols every time I have to use it, but I might be wrong because I suspect getting the proportion and kerning right might be really, really hard.

I've created a font for college once and it is a lot of work, but that depends on the extent of your alphabet, really. Since yours is different, I think Tolkien's Sindarin language could be a good resource for you. At least for inspiration? Since it's not just a matter of a different typography for you, it's a whole different language with different symbols...