Would like to create this font

[thesteps]

Attached is a sample font from the self test of a printer. I would like to create this font on  my Mac and be able to place in the font library. I am thinking of buying Scan Font plus whatever else I might need. Would this do what I need? Any help much appreciate as you can probably guess I am a novice at this sort of thing.

Kath

[Ray Larabie]

Is this a bitmap font? It's too blurry in the sample to figure out.

[thesteps]

Hi Ray

Thanks for your reply. Yes, I think its a bitmap font. It seems to be very basic fixed width, almost like an old mainframe font.  Very, very close to your PRINTF font. I have tried to give more samples. See attached file.

Cheers.
Kath

[Ray Larabie]

Right, ScanFont won't help you here. You need to build it yourself. You can plan it first on graph paper - that's how I'd do it. First of all figure out the grid. How many squares are used to make a capital. How many squares for the descender, x-height etc,. How many squares across?

To build the font, you have some options:

You can build a grid of squares in any font application such as Typetool. So you make one character that's just a solid array of squares. Copy that character to every glyph location. The all you have to do is delete the squares you don't need. Time consuming but it works.

Use the online tool "Fontstruct" to create your font. Then you can finesse it using software such as Typetool if you like.

Use a bitmap font editor. That I don't know much about them. Perhaps someone here can suggest one. I haven't done any of those since the 1980s.


On the other hand, if you want to make kind of a grungy printer font that looks authentic, ScanFont would be good. Just print all the characters you can and get a really high res scan. Clean it up in Photoshop and create a pure black & white (1bit) image. Import into Scanfont and it'll spit out a decent grunge font. You'll have to adjust a few things here and there but ScanFont's pretty easy to figure out. But it certainly won't turn that font into a clean bitmap font, nothing will.

[thesteps]

Hi Ray

Many thanks for your reply and suggestions.  Sounds a little complicated but maybe it's just time consuming, but I'm certainly going to give it a go. 

Incidentally, I also contacted Ascender Corporation via your website who quoted a minimum of $2000 to produce the font for me. Worth having a go myself first.  I'll let you know how I get on.

Cheers
Kath

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