What is Reddit's opinion of BirdFont?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

An open source software with a shitty UI, no way?!

More seriously, not really. Well maybe you can try Birdfont but usually FontForge is regarded as the most complete free editor. Birdfont looks more simple so it might work for you, I don’t know much about it.

I've just discovered Birdfont which doesn't appear to be overly complex. It has an autotrace feature which is what it looks like you're after.

https://birdfont.org/doku/doku.php/autotrace_in_birdfont_2.x

Depends on the platform! To start out, maybe check out the free web tool Glyphr: www.glyphrstudio.com If you’re iPad first, I’d pick up iFont Maker ($7.99) https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ifontmaker/id377381670 — Fontise is maybe more popular but not as good. On a desktop, check out Birdfont: https://birdfont.org. Please know that font design is a pretty big PITA and my guess is the color-changing stickers we’ve seen so far are using an existing open source icon font like Font Awesome or similar. Good luck & happy designing!

What you need is proper font editor, something like this:
https://birdfont.org/

I was able to create and use ttf font using this software.

You said "I have the characters I want to use" - in what form do you have it? Is it vector image or raster image?

I wound up on this thread and in this subreddit today because of my desire to make a custom symbol typeface and my discovery of BirdFont in the process. I don't know if BirdFont even falls into the last bare bones category,

I am glad to know that I wasn't crazy in my initial search for a program to create a typeface, finding what seemed to be nothing more than either over expensive, under-developed "professional" software, or a handful of barely functional string and bailing wire solutions that would create a final .ttf or .otf product.

Please understand that I am in no way a professional, or even an amateur font creator, I just wanted to answer the call of "(If there are any notable others that I may have missed, I would love to here them)" without knowing if it even falls under the category of "notable".

Thanks.

Thanks! I actually started with the caps, and later added the lowercase and the rest of the characters. I started with characters like 'H', 'O', 'n' and 'o' and used these shapes as a foundation for the other characters, in order to ensure consistency. And the rest basically just "happened". I started roughly two weeks ago, but there's still a lot left to do: add kerning pairs, fix overlapping paths, etc.

Edit: I designed it with Birdfont.

u/FasterThanHouses shared the programme BirdFont on this sub a while back.

Similar workflow to the others linked here—create your glyphs using a vector graphics editor, and then import them into BirdFont to set kerning and ligatures and such.

Any which way you go about it, it's a lot of work; a bit of learning, and a whole lot of tedious repetition. It's well-worth it, though.

And in the silver category, I would check out Birdfont and Trufont. Both relative newcomers.

Type design software in the open-source world is not as developed as it is in the commercial world, but all three of the aforementioned are actively used by type designers around the world.

Unfortunately, curves are one of the major limitations of Fontstruct. As they themselves subtly note ("Some fonts you just can’t FontStruct"), at that point, you're best off getting a dedicated font creation program. While there are tons out there at a variety of prices (I personally use High Logic Font Creator), there are some free ones out there, like Font Forge and Birdfont. Hope this helps.

I recommend BirdFont. It is a vector graphic font making application, available for Windows, MacOS and Linux. It has free and paid versions. It allows you to make ligatures, which are any combinations of characters that together make make new symbols. So you can have ligatures for each of the 189 combinations you have. I made this font with a few ligatures (like "dg", "qu" and "ss") using the free version.

For tutorials, there are some videos for BirdFont. But I actually watched the ones for another font making app called Glyphs, which is more famous I guess. They have similarities.

I'm not quite sure what you need. Do you want to make a font that shows different characters/shapes when you type on your regular keyboard? If it is the case, BirdFont is a font making application, with free and paid versions. I made this with its free version. You just type what's in the left column, to get what's in the right. Since it is a font, you can export it, install on your computer, or anyone else's computer, and they can use it from their text editing software of choice.

The tools in BirdFont are somewhat similar to AI and PS, and another font making application called Glyphs. It is payed, but there are more tutorials for it on YouTube than BirdFont.

Making a font is quit tedious, because you have to create every single character, and make sure they line up with each other. And they are vector graphics.

Hopefully my answer is somewhat helpful.

I've used https://birdfont.org/ (mac) before to build and customize a icon font set. I was producing a magazine and wanted icons for contact deets etc, and a few custom icons. It's pretty easy to use, export svg from AI and import into birdfont.

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You can do a GREP search on the merged document

~a\t$

That will search for and select anchored object, tab, end of paragraph

My process is to design in Illustrator then export as svg to import into Birdfont.

When using illustrator, it's preferable to use as few anchor points as necessary to render the characters.

If you create compound shapes (unite, minus front, intersect, exclude) in Illustrator, check the anchors to make sure the characters are rendered the way you think they are. Check the x and y coordinates to make sure anchors line up if you expect them to form a straight line, etc.

It's not absolutely necessary, but I like to render my fonts as 3d text in a 3d modeling program like Autodesk Maya. I discovered early on in my designs that messed up anchor points on characters may be easier to spot when the characters are rendered in 3d with depth.

If your font design is simple, you can reuse characters you've already designed as a template for others, like making a b a reversed d.

It's preferable to design all characters at the same size since resizing from a freehand design may give you different proportions for different characters.

If you think a character design doesn't look creative enough, browse similar fonts to the one you're designing for ideas. You don't want to copy a full character, but there may be a specific style of ascender/descender/serif or whatever detail you hadn't thought to try.

For my first font, I designed extra European characters with umlauts and grave accents, etc. I stopped doing it for the later ones because it was too time consuming and most of my fonts are display fonts. So I tend to create all the characters and punctuation on an American keyboard. If you're designing a text font for general readability, you may want to go further and design the rest of the extended character set, but know that that will be a lot more time consuming.

you are right, it's s substitution cipher stacked with a transposition cipher.

I thought about making a font with Birdfont and using Pillow to create the picture.

> Sega like font but it's not the exact font

This is b/c they have to make at least some substantial change or pay the rights holder to the font...(we don't have to worry about this kind of stuff...it's only worth the copyright holder's time if the infringer has money to sue for based on the usage)

If the 'a' just kills you and you can't stand it, you can edit the font using this program: https://birdfont.org/

I've found it useful.