I am new to Glyphs and typography. Thought making a font of my handwriting was going to be quick and easy but man was I wrong. That being said, having a lot of fun learning and loving the process!!
I am creating a font of my own handwriting so that my revision notes resemble my handwritten notes, and then when I annotate my notes on my iPad the typed and handwritten words are virtually indistinguishable.
I started by drawing 3 sets of glyphs with multiple characters. I’ve imported these onto Glyphs, have played around with the spacing and kerning and am happy with the final product. I want to create a bold version now but I’m not sure how to approach this.
Since it’s all handwritten and therefore I have varying widths, heights, depths, etc. of all my glyphs, I’m thinking the easiest way to make a bold version is to do exactly what I did for the regular version (draw out all the characters by hand in a template and import to Glyphs) but in a thicker Apple Pencil width.
Would this work? Since I’m new to all this I don’t want to deep dive too much into coding as I’ll overcomplicate things for myself. Also my regular weight glyphs aren’t ‘uniform’, so the strokes are all slightly different thickness depending on the pressure used when drawing them originally so I imagine it’s not as simple as ‘just increase the stroke size’.
Will I still be able to make the bolder font the bold master of the regular font if I do it this way? Since it won’t be ‘regular font, just thicker’ and will technically be a new font entirely just in a thicker pen, I want to confirm this’ll work before I get started!! Thanks!
So there should be interpolated weights between your Regular and Bold masters? (If not, you can put both drawings into the same file, and they don’t have to be compatible)
The way I worked for my FF Uberhand handwriting font is that I drew a thin and a black master using a brush tool, put the drawing in the background, then first drew on top of the thin background by hand (to have only the minimum amount of contour points), then copied the thin contours to the black master, and using the nudge tool (shift-control-drag) moved the contour points to fit the black background. This way I could make sure I have clean and interpolatable outlines.
I don’t have any documentation of the original process, but the principle is demonstrated in this video: https://youtu.be/U8ZyoM3jAV4
Oh gosh, I think I’ve misled you into thinking I know more than I actually do. I’m a super beginner, just working out the basics as I go along and using what I can find online to help (I’ve come across a lot of your tutorials and answers so thank you for getting me so far!!).
I haven’t even got a second master going yet, and I’m not 100% confident that’s what I actually need now. All I have so far is a single master/font titled ‘Regular’ (the automatically pre-populated master when starting a new font I think). I’m happy with what I’ve created as my ‘regular’ font, but now want to create a thicker one. To us laypeople, I just mean I want to create a bolder font, however I appreciate that that might be the wrong term in the typography world. I’m still getting my head around all the terminology - I’m not quite sure if what I am trying to make is a second master, an interpolated weight, a new font, etc. Sorry, super beginner here.
I read the tutorial on interpolated weights but it talks a lot about axes and increasing stroke widths by different factors (that bit about how the middle horizontal in an ‘e’ increases by a lesser amount than the top and bottom strokes, for example) and I figured that’s overcomplicating what I want. I want to just create a ‘bolder’ font which is essentially just my handwriting but in a thicker pen tip. I figured the easiest way would be to just start from scratch writing out all my glyphs on my free Calligraphr template on my iPad but just using a 1.2mm pen instead of 0.8mm, but I wasn’t sure if this would work in my font family.
When I come to download this font to my laptop, will I be able to type in this Handwriting font and then highlight words to make turn them from ‘Handwriting regular’ to ‘Handwriting bold’? That’s what I’m aiming for. But I wasn’t sure if creating a second font from scratch by redrawing all the glyphs again would allow me to do that, or if it wouldn’t be recognised as the same font family?
Also if there is just an easier way to create my ‘bold’ font that would be great. I’m currently reading about offsetting curves to see if that might be an easier way to create my bolder font???
I recently digitised my dad’s handwriting as a birthday present. I’ve never done script fonts before, but using lttrink.com, I made very quick progress. Making a bold weight was a click of a button, simply adjusting the brush size.
They offer a seven-day trial, which should be ample.
What a fantastic birthday present idea, I bet he loved it.
I’ll look into Lttrink thank you!! Will it mean I have to start from scratch with a new font or can I build off of what I’ve got so far? I had a look at it just before I posted this but I wasn’t sure if I could work off of the glyphs I made on my iPad of my real handwriting, but if you turned your dad’s handwriting into glyphs then I’m assuming you can work off of pre-designed glyphs???
I’m not sure how you drew the glyphs on your iPad. I assume you’d have to start over in order to work with letterink. The good thing is: it’s skeleton-based, meaning you only need to draw a centre line and the tool (basically) does all the rest for you.
Hello Hannah, I am just a few months ahead of you.
Related to creating another Master (for Bold), this might be useful (its answer after mine) if you have not got this far.
I cannot remember all the details of how I did this but this is a link to the user guide:
You see both are listing.
Not sure what Metrics are showing in yours, they are the lines you see when editing.
They are the same in my Regular and Bold.
See the Weight number, the Bold, I made it a larger number.
(I have not yet finished the font, so not sure if all my settings work on actual export, but I have been using Window menu > Text Preview to check how it looks, although I sometimes use the free Font Goggles.)
In Glyphs, you use cmd-1 and cmd-2 to swap between Regular and Bold.
There is some kind of script you can use to populate all your Regular Glyphs into the Bold cells, if you ask here, someone will give you instructions, but I did it by copy/paste just one-by-one as I made each bold.
Make it Bold
Have you tried the Filter (menu) > Offset curve?
I found if you add a different number in the Horizontal then click in the Vertical, the horizontal will update, so you can play around with the numbers clicking between them and see if it works for you.
Otherwise you could select (by dragging) an area of points and then drag them in the direction to make it bold.
If you have too many points there is Filter > Clean up lines and Filter > Delete short segments which might work (I did not have much success with them and ended up deleting quite a few unneeded points to make it easier to expand to the bold I wanted, but I have had experience with vector paths previously.)
Variations
I was not going to add any variations using scripts, but now I have my Regular and Bold done, I have started playing around with these possibilities. Ask at the forum here for help if you want to go into that area, it’s fun. For example some or all of your letters at either the beginning of any word or at its end, can be a variation of how they “normally” look, and letters that occur together, perhaps like ss or fi could be what is called a ligature where as you type in those two letters one after the other and they then look slightly different as a pair, perhaps joined as you might do if you are using a pen on paper.
Additions
You will probably want to add things like numbers, question mark, ? ! + - / { } arrows, etc.
Right-click on the Punctuation or Symbol options to add them to your Glyphs, then add them in, you might have some already.
And I think you add a space, which defines the width of a space when you type spacebar to separate words.
Someone here might comment back about what I have typed here for you if it is incorrect or could do with clarification or extra links.
