4.6 USING YOUR OWN FONTS4.6.1 Font design is tedious
Awarning: font design is an art. Don’t expect to turn out professional-
lookingfonts in afew hours.
Sometimes,though, you have to build your own typeface, even if you don’t
work with acompany in the font-selling business. You may, for example,
want to print your own customized company logo. It means building up
characters withinacell or grid, perhaps 50 dots high and 35 wide —lots of
dots.
Becausedefining yourown typeface is sotedious,make sure you’vechecked
out as many downloadable fonts as you can find from font development
companies.
Thenext handiestway todo thejob is toask around,maybe whereyou bought
yourLaserPrinter 4111,tosee if you can get one of the font-creating or font-
editingutility programsnow onthe market.FonrGen IV+is one.Keep an eye
out, too, for new word processing tools that might save you the trouble of
painstakingly figuring out details likekerning.
Even with aids like these, building acustom font is an intricate process. It
calls for thecreation of afamily of up to 200 characters sharing acommon
design and proportional scheme, and that’sjust for one type size. No mean
feat.
4.6.2 How to download your own fonts
Characters that you define and store yourself are called “user-defined”
characters.Let assume you already know what text is to be in your custom
font, and have designed itstype’face,weight, width and style. Once you’ve
created your own characters. you’ll need to download them to your laser
printer.
79