The font I posted in the previous entry was the result of about ten successive attempts, trying to get the fontifier.com site to produce the highest quality output possible. The font still needs some tweaking -- the zero character is quite screwed up, for one thing -- so I might take another shot at it sometime.
In the hope that others might find this information useful, here I've listed some of the things I found to be helpful when trying to produce a good font with Fontifier. I'm no expert so this may not be the best possible advice, it's just a list of things that seemed to work well for me.
- Print the template image as large as you can -- use a program that lets you print it to fill the whole sheet of paper. It'll give you more room to write, the strokes won't look too fat, and you'll get a better image when you scan it back in.
- Use the right pen. A biro, or anything similarly stingy in its ink output, will trace so badly that the resulting font will probably be unusable -- the lines just won't be visible enough. Use a felt-tip pen, like the site says. A marker will probably be too thick (unless you want a very bold font).
- Maybe it goes without saying, but when you're drawing the characters, be as consistent as possible in size and style.
- Scan the image as cleanly and sharply as possible. Use a fairly high resolution (I used 300dpi, but I wouldn't recommend any higher -- 300 was probably overkill, and the sheer size of the resulting image brought my machine to its knees when editing it) -- you'll have to shrink it before submitting the image, but you'll have some high resolution raw data to work with in the meantime.
- Make sure the page is exactly square on the scanner bed. If it's rotated even half a degree, it will cause problems. Of course, a skewed scanned image can also be corrected in your image manipulation package.
- Scan a little beyond the edges of the outer black box. Make sure all four edges are present in the scan, or the whole process will fail.
- In your graphics program, adjust the contrast and levels of the image. Your goal is to get the whites of the paper to be pure white and the ink to be pure black. Eliminate all possible noise and try to get it as two-tone as possible while still preserving the smoothness of the character edges.
- Now that you have your high-quality scanned image, you can tweak it as much as you like in software before sending it off to be fontified. You can do a lot here -- paint out ink splodges or edit strokes that go too far, or even assemble a composite character set of the best characters from several pages of attempts.
- This next step makes a massive difference -- repositioning. Unless you're gifted with supreme coordination, your characters, all drawn in their respective boxes, probably weren't all that accurately and consistently placed on the baseline (indicated by those little ticks on the left and right of the character boxes). Using cut and paste, move your characters around in the boxes until they share a consistent vertical positioning with the other characters on the same row.
- Now you can rescale the image. Fontifier will accept images up to 1280×960 resolution, and the bigger the image the better your font will look, so make your image as large as possible while keeping it within these dimensions (needless to say, preserve the aspect ratio and do a smooth rescale, not a nearest-neighbour).
- Even if you give it a perfect scan, fontifier's tracing algorithms are not perfect. It will sometimes screw up a character or two through no fault of your own. Tweak, reposition a little, rescan... just persevere with it.
Here's a sample of the type and general quality of .gif file that you'll want to try to upload to the site.
Update: Well, arse! fontifier.com has just ended its beta and gone non-free. This entry that I've just spent half an afternoon writing comes a day too late to be generally useful.
Perfect.
I'm quitting blogging. I'm going to farm alpacas.