Hello.
This is my first time posting here. I am an artist who specializes in ink drawings in the style of late medieval art. I hope, in the coming years, to illustrate and publish (as fine press books) my own editions of several blockbooks popular in the 15th century.
I have drawn the characters for a font that I want to use in these books. (It is based on 15th century half-roman letters, pushed back in the direction of rotunda.) I am fairly confident in the design of the characters, but need help figuring out how to get them into a proper file so that I can use them on the computer.
What I want to do with this typeface is somewhat peculiar, and I cannot tell, based on the online product descriptions, which program would best (or even) be able to do what I want, without requiring me to pay for a lot of features that I shall never use.
I am hoping that someone with experience using different font design programs will be able, based on my descriptions below, to recommend the least expensive one suited to the task. I shall greatly appreciate any advice.
I am open to the possibility of paying a designer to do the computer work for me, although my preference is to learn to use the program myself, so that I can make adjustments to the characters (and possibly design 2 or 3 other fonts in the future). I am also open to the possibility of paying someone to walk me through the process in person (I am in Chicago).
Yours truly,
D. Mitsui
danmitsui[at]hotmail[dot]com
1) I work on a Mac, running OSX 10.7.5. The usual programs in which I shall be using this font are Photoshop Elements 12 and Word 2008 for Mac.
2) The characters for this typeface were first drawn by hand on paper, and then edited as 1200dpi black and white bitmap files. This is the format I have them in now, and I want to be able to load these bitmaps directly into the font design program, without needing to redraw everything.
3) Because they were drawn by hand, the characters are a little rough around the edges, and I want them to stay so.
4) I have the characters designed at two sizes; one 16pt and one 48pt. The smaller one is what I plan to use most often. I do not really need other sizes.
5) Therefore, I suspect that I should try to create a bitmap font rather than a vector font, but the bitmap font design programs I have seen are intended for computer displays; I do not know if any of them would let me create characters that are 900 or 300 pixels tall.
6) Even if I do use a vector font, almost every page that I design eventually will be turned into a 1200dpi bitmap file, rendered onto a plastic or metal plate and used for letterpress printing.
7) I prefer to use a font design program that automatically suggests spacing between letters, as I naturally tend to compress this too much.
8) For the same reason, I prefer to have an automatic kerning feature.
9) I have a very small character set, specifically tailored to setting works in late medieval Latin and English. There are, for example, no arabic numerals. There are 144 characters total, 44 of which are ligatures.
10) If possible, I want the ligatures to be inserted automatically.
11) I want to program certain special characters that I shall use often into keys for characters that I shall not use at all; for example, hit "1" and get a long s; hit "2" and get a half r; hit "3" and get a tailed z et cetera.
