I wanted to make a font based on my handwriting using only free software. It turns out that FontForge can be scripted with Python. I know just a little about Python and even less about typography, but I managed to hack together something that worked for me. If you're reading this on my blog at https://sachachua.com/blog/ , you'll probably see the new font being used on the blog post titles. Whee!

My rough notes are at https://github.com/sachac/sachac-hand/ . I wanted to write it as a literate program using Org Babel blocks. It's not really fully reproducible yet, but it might be a handy starting point. The basic workflow was:

1. Generate a template using other fonts as the base.
2. Import the template into Medibang Paint on my phone and draw letters on a different layer. (I almost forgot the letter q, so I had to add it at the last minute.)
3. Export just the layer with my writing.
4. Cut the image into separate glyphs using Python and autotrace each one.
5. Import each glyph into FontForge as an SVG and a PNG.
6. Set the left side and right side bearing, overriding as needed based on a table.
7. Figure out kerning classes.
8. Hand-tweak the contours and kerning.
9. Use sfnt2woff to export the web font file for use on my blog, and modify the stylesheet to include it.

I really liked being able to specify kerning classes through an Org Mode table like this:

	None	o,a,c,e,d,g,q,w	f,t,x,v,y,z	h,b,l,i,k	j	m,n,p,r,u	s	T	zero
None	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
f	0	-102	-61	-30	0	-60	0	-120	-70
t	0	-70	-41	-25	0	0	0	-120	-10
r	0	-82	-41	-25	0	-20	0	-120	29
k	0	-50	-81	-20	0	-20	-48	-120	-79
l	0	-41	-50	0	0	0	0	-120	-52
v	0	-40	-35	-30	0	0	0	-120	30
b,o,p	0	-20	-80	0	0	0	0	-120	43
a	0	-23	-60	0	0	0	0	-120	7
W	0	-40	-30	-20	0	0	0	-120	17
T	0	-190	-120	-60	0	-130	0	0	-188
F	0	-100	-90	-60	0	-70	-100	-40	-166
two	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	-53

I had a hard time defining classes using the FontForge interface because I occasionally ended up clearing my glyph selection, so it was great being able to just edit my columns and rows.

Clearly my kerning is still very rough–no actual values for j, for example–but it's a start. Also, I can probably figure out how to combine this with character pair kerning and have two tables for easier tweaking.

A- insisted on tracing my handwriting template a few times, so I might actually be able to go through the same process to convert her handwriting into a font. Whee!