You can create 2 types of fonts with Fontself for Photoshop:
Vector fonts (the type of fonts we’re already familiar with)
Bitmap fonts (the shiny cool new thing. Learn how to create a color bitmap font in Photoshop)
Fontself automatically detects the type of artwork you use when you start creating a font. So it generates vector fonts when you convert Shape layers into glyphs, and it generates bitmap fonts when you use Image layers.
While Fontself supports both types, you can’t yet mix both bitmap & vector glyphs in a single font file. One day, who knows…
Vector fonts VS Bitmap fonts
Now, here’s what you’ll learn on this page:
Prepare your artwork
Turn your artwork into a font
Edit & reopen your fonts
Delete or replace a glyph
Non-Latin alphabets
Accents, punctuation & more
Prepare your artwork
Draw each letter using the Pen tool on a single Shape layer. Any vector shape you add to a Shape layer will be part of the character you end up creating (in the current version of Fontself, the shape’s color will not be taken into consideration).
Switch the Pen Tool from Shape mode to the Path mode if you need to add more contours to your glyph.
Fixing cutouts
If your letter shapes include cutout paths, apply the appropriate method to avoid filled glyphs:
Select the inner shapes using the Direct Selection Tool (white arrow)
Pick the Substract Front Shape method from the Path Operations icon
Other recommendations
All letters should be aligned on a single row to import them at once.
Alphabets should be aligned too, ordered from left to right: A to Z.
Numbers should be aligned, ordered from left to right: 0 to 9.
Turn your artwork into a font
Select one or several layers you want to convert into glyphs.
Click on the Fontself panel buttons to turn layers into characters:- For a single character, type or paste the related character in the Fontself text field and press “Create Glyph”. - For a whole alphabet, press the “a-z” button if it’s a set of lowercase letters or press “A-Z” for uppercase.- For any other set of characters, press Batch. Glyphs created with this method get assigned with a unique character key that you can change (it looks like an empty square on the orange background). They are actually Private Use Area (PUA) characters you can copy/paste in other apps.
Drag & drop on the Fontself panel also works as an alternate way to create glyphs. Just drop your selection on top of the relevant area.
Adjust the baseline & margins around each glyph in the Fontself panel (just click & drag), and you can also change the keyboard key by typing a new character below each glyph.
Press Save to save your font as an OpenType .otf file and click on the Open Font link in the green alert to install the font on your operating system.
That’s about it. Now rince, repeat and have fun!
Can’t see your fonts once installed? No worries. When you save a font and use it in Mac apps like TextEdit or Pages, it may not show up in your Fonts panel. This occurs when fonts do not have all the glyphs required by the system, and it can be solved by selecting “All Fonts” in the panel’s “Collection” column:
⌘-T to display your Fonts panel, then 1. extend the size the panel to display the Collection column, 2. select All Fonts and 3. find & pick your personal font.
Extra tip: if you scale up your Font panel even larger, you can even search fonts by typing their name ;)
Edit & reopen your fonts
While you save your work directly as a font file, you can reopen and edit the fonts you’ve created in Fontself very easily: just press the “Open” button.
Note that you cannot yet edit any font that wasn’t built with Fontself. You can however open any font created with this tool.
You can change the margins, baseline and character for each glyph you’ve created, and also change the global spacing between characters & text lines.
You can easily rename any glyph by clicking on the text below each glyph: just type (or copy/paste) the character you want. Easy!
Delete or replace a glyph
To remove a glyph just roll over it on the Fontself panel and click on the trash icon.
If you want to update a glyph with a new design or replace it with something different, no need to delete it: just select the new shape (eventually along with a horizontal guide to precisely define its baseline), enter the same character you want to replace and press the Create Glyph button, and click on Replace.
Non-Latin alphabets
Fontself runs well with Latin-based languages and Cyrillic, but is still not yet optimized for non-Latin languages like Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, Greek, Chinese, etc.
Our goal is to broaden support to more scripts later on, when we can properly manage key OpenType features like right-to-left writing flow.
These updates will be released as part of our free updates.
Now, that being said, you can assign any Unicode character to a glyph, so it could also be a single character in a non-Latin script that is not yet supported by Fontself, like a Chinese 爱 or an Arabic ﷺ.
Accents, punctuation & more
As long as you can type it, you can assign any character to any shape or image you want. And if you ever dreamed about making custom bullet points or an alien language, you’re good to use any of the following:
Accented characters like à, È, ñ, å
Other characters like ø, ß, ş
Non-Latin characters like Ω, β, Д, б
Symbols like €, √, ☞
Bullets & Arrows like ☑︎, •, ⇒, ➽
Punctuation like ¡¿, “, ’, or ❡
Pictograms like ☼, ♛, ☯
You can easily rename any glyph you created by clicking on the text below each glyph: just type (or copy/paste) the character you want. Easy!
#Tip: On a Mac, press Ctrl+⌘+Space to display the characters palette in most Mac app… well, except in Photoshop :(