Part 1 Making your own font

There is a standard way of going about making your own font, and it always involves money. If you know your own way around your computer and the internet, you can build a new font with these tools:

1. A sheet (or many if you are like me) of white gloss bond paper. Does not need cotton rag mixture.
2. a scanner
3. A good quality paint program that allows you to edit the scan.

OK, this is the beginning of the process, because it is a long process, but the ability to express yourself with your own print can help define you as a person, and personalize email to friends, cards and blogs/ web sites.

Print in line fashion this set of letters:

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
a b c d e f g and so on

All characters to print

I discovered that the sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" contains all the letters in the alphabet. I thought it was spurious! You may want to repeat that sentence several times. If you make an error, simply repeat the letters, crossing out the bad ones.

Next, the scan. Scan it as high quality as possible. If you have the ability to adjust your scan with software that came with the scanner, make sure that the contrast between your letters and the paper is as shar4p as possible. I adjusted mine until I got the parchment effect. It was half skill and half good fortune. My scanner came with OK effects and scan transform options.

Save the scan as a bitmap (bmp) or a .jpg. Be careful with bitmaps, because a high quality scan can be a very large file Apple supports these formats as do PCs: .jpg, .bmp, .gif, .tiff

Next time---using your paint program to organize, replace and doctor your scan so it is ready to be made into your personalized font.