Scanahand 1.0 • High-Logic
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Can you really make a font in five minutes? You can now.

Scanahand is a new product from High-Logic. It makes it easy to create Windows Truetype fonts from your handwriting. Print the template, fill it in, run it through Scanahand, and save your font.

1. Getting Started
2. Filling-in the Template
3. Improving Results
4. Conclusions

Getting Started

• Step 1: Print out the template, with a green guideline for the baseline if you have a colour printer.
• Step 2: Fill in the template using a suitable pen, place it on your scanner and scan it into the program.
• Step 3: Click on Generate, give your font a name, and your font will be generated in about forty seconds. Save the font and install it.

Filling-in the Template

This is not so easy to do well. Anyone who can write can make a font, but making one worth keeping needs some practice. Don’t spend too long with your first attempt, you will probably take at least three or four attempts to get a satisfactory result.

If you make a few minor errors you can save the template and edit it later in your favourite photo editing software, and load it again before generating the font.

Here are a few important points to be mindful of:

• Write on the baseline
• Write the correct letter in each grid square
• Don’t write over the grid lines
• Keep the letter size uniform, and the strokes smooth

Improving Results

This is my font after a few trial runs to get to know how the software works. I am certainly no artist, but with a bit more practice I will get it right.

The baseline is fairly even, and the spacing is OK, but some letters are not very well formed.

If, like me, you haven’t used a pen for years, you will need some practice to learn how to write fluently again.

I tried a few felt-tip pens, but I prefer to use a calligraphic pen, which is just like a fountain pen with a wide nib. It lets you create thick and thin strokes, and gives a nice even black line.

If you drop a few spots of ink on the template or mess up a few letters, never mind, you don’t need to start all over again. Write the spoiled letters again in the margins. You can save templates and edit them in your favourite photo-editing software to clean up spots, move letters up or down to align with the baseline, and cut and paste good letters over spoiled ones. You can even slightly stretch those letters that are the wrong size.

Here is the same font generated again after a bit of touching up in IrfanView.

I moved a few letters down to the baseline, trimmed a bit off the arm of the lowercase “t”, and switched the € and ¢ symbols, which I had written in the wrong squares.

Conclusions

Creating fonts is not quite as easy as one thinks it will be. Many users who downloaded the trial version of FontCreator gave up because there was just too much to learn. Scanahand certainly makes the process a lot easier. There is no need to learn about font metrics, glyph mapping, or side-bearings. You just have to learn how to fill in the template.

A few users may still be disappointed. Not because the software cannot do what it claims to do, but because they are not artistic enough to write neatly, nor creative enough to design an attractive font. Most of us can type a lot faster than we can write, and it looks a lot better.

However, those who are patient will soon be creating fonts to be proud of. Perhaps for them Scanahand will be the steppingstone that they need to start creating professional quality fonts in FontCreator.

Existing users of FontCreator will find that Scanahand is a very quick way to get designs into FontCreator. Several users have asked for graphic tablet support for drawing in FontCreator. Perhaps this is even better — use regular drawing tools, and automatically convert the outlines into a Truetype font. You can, of course, also use a graphics tablet in your photo-editing software to fill in the Scanahand template.