The Font of Madness!

Darth Waiter

So, I have a great idea for a present for a friend who has a fancy for H.P. Lovecraft: a homemade Necronomicon. Now, I have a few free fonts that I've downloaded and they look great for the effect that I'm going for. Unfortunately, the fonts themselves are limited in what they do typing-wise. What I would like to do is create my own version of a font using pieces of the other alphabets that I have. I already took a look at Fontstruct (which is awesome, by the way) but a bunch of the images are nonstandard as far as pixels go and Fontstruct (as far as I can figure) won't let you copy/paste an image to work with, and that's all I really need. Oh, and when I get it finished, I'll be more than happy to share it for any non-commercial uses anyone has.

tl;dr - Help me find a free, easy way to upload an image into a font using pieces of another font and you get to have it for free (and incite madness.)

MagicToaster

It seems that your program generates True Type Fonts, I don't think you'll be able to use images as a source data to create this kind of font. The reason being that fonts need to be scalable, they have to look good at 8pts as well as 200pts. When you use raster images (jpgs, gifs, tiffs) they have limited scalability due to the fact that they're bound to a bitmap resolution.

I think you'll need to draw them in a vector drawing program like Adobe Illustrator, Freehand or Corel Draw and import the vector data to the font program.

Out of curiosity, what problems are you encountering with the fonts you downloaded?

Darth Waiter

Mostly, it's just an issue of liking a ton of the characters and a handful of them being too close to the Roman alphabet to look like an ancient outer space language (a la' At the Mountains of Madness). I'd like to take portions of the current available fonts and piece together a new one. The characters themselves are already in a true-type format; I just need to play mix and match.

flatlinegraphics

http://www.cthulhulives.org/toybox/PROPDOCS/PropFonts.html
some free, some not.
http://www.1001fonts.com/font_details.html?font_id=794
hpl inspired runic font
http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/
free font editor
http://www.fontlab.com/font-editor/fontographer/
a lot less free.

if you already have a bunch of glyphs you want to combine to make a font, fontforge is probably the way to go. it will decompile the existing ttf's and allow you to mix match and export a new ttf.

MuddBudd

Just copy and paste youtube comments in there.

Descendant X

For the Necronimicon, go to the HPLHS site that flatline linked above and use HPLHS-Blackletter for the headings, HPLHS-Manuscript Caps for various things, and HPLHS-WW2Blackletter for the bulk of the text. It will look like a medieval text and should turn out quite well.

And send me a pm when you're done. I'd have to see this. Please.

Darth Waiter

Okay, I'm gonna check out Fontforge right now.

Darth Waiter

http://www.download.com/FontCreator/3000-2316_4-10026325.html

Okay, this is a pretty awesome trial version for 30 days; if I can't make half a dozen fonts in 30 days, I need to turn in my nerd credentials. Also, I just had a look at some of the Lovecraft fonts and holy crap are they nice. I could use those all day long for any number of reasons. Unfortunately, after cracking open the files with the editor, the "Glyphis 1" font has about 260+ sigils in it and Glyphis 2 & 3 have another 60 each.

Now I have a whole new problem. Gimme a few hours and let me come up with a workaround.