Help

Overview
Step 1 – Get and Complete Your Font Form
Step 2 – Scan and Save Your Form
Step 3 – Upload Your Form
Step 4 – Buying and Download Your Font

Overview

Using Handfont is technically a four step process, as laid out on the home page. However, it really boils down to filling out a template of characters, scanning them in to your computer, and having handfont process that form to turn into a font. We just break it down into very small pieces to make each step simpler. If you’d like, you can also mail the form to us at the address listed in Contact Us. Please email us first though at support@handfont.com to let us know you’d like to do it this way.

Step 1 – Get and Complete Your Font Form
In step one, click on the link to bring up the blank form, which is a pdf (Adobe) file. Print that out.

Write Your Characters
Fill in the form and some tips to keep in mind:

A thin felt pen is recommended, but not required. You must use a pen of some kind though – pencil will not scan well.
Write naturally (don’t worry about making it much neater than you usually would). Do try to avoid breaks in the characters, cross-outs, or large mistakes in general, as these will repeat over and over and diminish that naturalness of the resulting font. If you have to, it’s OK to use White-Out or similar products and re-write any character.
Most characters should go from the bottom hash mark nearly to the top hash mark (two-thirds of the way up is fine). All capital letters and numbers should be filled out this way. Most lower case are as well, though some letters are naturally taller (like ‘f’, and ‘h’) than others. You should size them relative to each other in the same proportion you would when writing naturally. Note that some characters, like the period and comma, sit along the bottom hash mark.
Leave a margin around each character (indicated by red arrows in the sample letter “O”; don't draw up to the edge of each cell.

If you stick with writing naturally you shouldn’t have to worry too much about the above points. As indicated, you can always make corrections using White-Out, white tape, small white labels, and similar products. Filling out a form without corrections should generally take five minutes or less.

Step 2 – Scan and Save Your Form
Scan your form - Settings that are verified to work well are grayscale at 150 or 300 dpi (the more dpi, the larger the file), or black and white at 300 or 600 dpi. Try to scan the form so that the resulting image is not at an angle. Make sure the scan captures the entire template,than the characters depicted above each box.

Step 3 - Upload Your Form
In this step you will upload the scanned form to Handfont for processing, which will turn it into a font (our fonts are .ttf files) that you can use on your computer. Simply an enter a name for your font in the first box, and then your name in the second box to further identify it. Then click on “Select Forms”, and browse to your scanned file. Selecting it and clicking “Open” will begin the upload process.

Note that if you have scanned in multiple forms, you can select them all at once by highlighting one at a time (left click first file, then control-left click subsequent files). In this case, clicking “Open” will upload all selected files.

You will see the progress of the upload of the scanned form file(s) via the green status bar. When this completes, you will see the upload results in a table. From there you can delete any uploaded form or add a new one. Once you are ready, click next – this will initiate the process that turns your uploaded forms into font files, and will take you to the next step.

For advanced features, click on the Advanced link on the right side of the page. You can do two things here:

Normalize your font – You can set normalization between 0 and 100. The higher the number, the more the character size and alignment of your font is made consistent, resulting in a neater look. Zero means no adjustment takes place, which is the default.

Generate variations of your font - Here you can select up to nine variations (such as angling the characters), in varying amounts. The amount of variation is set by the slider. This We offer the cheapest

Step 4 - Buy and Download Your Font
To buy your font, you must sign into your account. If you don’t have one, create one now. Then enter your credit card information and make payment. Finally, click on next to download your font. Make a note of where you’ve saved it.

Preview and Buy Your Font
In this step you see a preview of your font. If it looks OK, click next to go. If not, repeat any steps that are necessary.

Install Your Font
This step has instructions for installing your font on your computer. The instructions are slightly different depending on your computer’s operating system. If necessary, or if your computer’s OS is not to the .ttf file and copying it to your computer’s special font directory.

Back to top