4 ms·

Ask HN: What's the easiest way to create a font from a scanned book's text?

• anenefan 4y ago
  If there is an existing font used, it's probably best to see if you can identify it. I haven't looked at the software available for some 12 years or so, way back when I was sorting out old manual pdfs. For one such manual I wanted to redo it completely, something where I started trying to identify the font, but then got too sick to continue with that hobby. I didn't feel like going the path of if the font was unique to map each character into a font table. Tools seem to have improved. A quick search found one such tool that might be useful to you. https://www.fontspring.com/matcherator https://www.fontspring.com/matcherator
  • acadapter 4y ago
    Thanks, but I was looking for something like a font creator, not something that takes the closest real font. And the text I am trying to process has some interesting letter glyph variants in different locations
    • anenefan 4y ago
      If you need to make a font then perhaps try FontForge. [1] Be aware that if you copy and use this created font in the web or self publish, which is very much all based on another source, you'll need to hope that it was a free font, and not one that will be aggressively defended by its creator. Just because a tool doesn't find a match doesn't mean someone or organisation has given up their rights. I'd first wonder just how good the tool is, and not just hot air. There were as of a few years ago, a few places on the web where one could ask for help to identify a font, since human knowledge is probably better at identifying odd fonts. [1] https://fontforge.org/en-US/ https://fontforge.org/en-US/
      • acadapter 4y ago
        Ah, thank you, it was something like that I was looking for. The copyright has expired, so I don't need to worry about that.