Recently my boyfriend left his iPad with me...I use it much more than he does :) I immediately started looking for drawing apps, and found one called Paper that I really liked. It's so much smoother than any drawing app I've ever seen--on a touch screen OR a computer.
Anyway, I started writing words and realized I could finally make my font like I'd like to do, and now I'm going to pass on how you can do that, with a tablet or just plain paper!
First you'll need to go to MyScriptFont.com. There are other sites like this, but this was the best actually free one that I found (there's another that says it's free, but you have to pay like $10 to actually download your font). Download the font Template to your computer. If you're going to print it out and write on it with a pen, do so. If you'd like to do this with a tablet and Photoshop like I did, go ahead and open it as a 300 dpi, grayscale file in Photoshop.
Next, if you haven't already written out the alphabet and all the symbols you want to include, do that. Using the template as a guide will help you remember symbols you can use. I wrote letters and symbols on different pages of my book in the Paper app and then emailed them to my computer and opened them in Photoshop next to the template. If you're doing it this way, then you'll need to use the Quick Selection tool (shortcut "W") to select only the letter you're using. For some reason, mine came out a little fuzzy at first, so I expanded the selection by one or two pixels to really get the whole effect of the letters. You can do this by going to Select --> Modify --> Expand --> 1 or 2 pixels. Once you've gotten the whole thing selected, copy the selection and switch over to the template, where you'll paste it.
Find the designated space for that letter, and use Free Transform (Ctrl + T) to fit the letter into the box. I just matched it up with the gray letter, for the most part, to determine the size and spacing.
Continue this process for the rest of the letters and symbols until you fill the template. I added a few accented letters because I use one for my name and use the others on occasion :) Save your file when you're finished.
Go back to the website, and click Choose File to upload your file. Then name your font in the space provided.
Hit "Send File" and wait for your font to be processed.
Ta dah! You should see a preview of your font and a link (the part I circled) to download the TTF file. Click that.
Next, you'll need to open up the Control Panel and go to your Font folder. To make it easy, if you have Windows 7, you can just open the Start menu and search "Fonts" and you should see all the fonts on your computer. Drag and drop the file you downloaded to this folder to copy and paste your handwritten font to your font folder so you can use it!
You can test this out by going to a word processor to see if your font is now available, which it is on mine! :)
Congratulations! Now go type away or make a bunch of other fun fonts. I already have another one all written out! Now I just need to bring myself to do this long process all over again.
Enjoy!
