Inverted glyph: bitmap > SVG via autotrace > glyph via fontforge

Question

I am trying to create a font/glyph by:

• taking a bitmap image
• creating an SVG with autotrace (on Linux)
• importing the outline as a glyph with pyt

Answer 1

It seems that your glyph is hand drawn. If you want to make a full TTF font with tens or hundreds of glyphs, then you might consider eg. Scanahand which I have used for generating hand drawn fonts. It uses a template, on which you draw (or paste) letters, so that they come in the right vertical position. Horizontal position (and spacing) are calculated automatically at least in [A-Za-z] (may be in the future also other letters).

But I appreciate your solution because it uses free or open source tools and you have nearly full control of everything (eg. spacings). And the finest thing with potrace and fontforge is that that you can do it on-the-fly or make an online font creation service! Potrace is ported on AS3 (it works, I tested) and now also in JS ( https://github.com/antimatter15/js-potrace or https://github.com/dunvi/potrace-js), so it should also be possible to make a realtime preview window, which shows how vectorization result changes when potrace parameters changes.