Using Affinity Publisher with Scanahand to produce a font

[William Overington]

There is a software program called Scanahand made by High-Logic, a Netherlands-based company.

https://www.high-logic.com/

I bought a licence for version 4 professional when that was the then current latest version.

In fact I have not used Scanahand very much, mostly because I do not have a scanner in use.

In fact I have only made using Scanahand one font that I use other than for testing. That font was, in fact, made using the beta test version of the original Scanahand many years ago.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/localizable_sentences_the_novel_chapter_046.pdf The font made using Scanahand is on page 2 of the PDF

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/localizable_sentences_the_novel_author_note_after_chapter_046.pdf The font is used throughout this document

However, although intended for producing fonts made using hand drawn hardcopy artwork scanned into a computer, it is also possible to produce, using Scanahnd, a font by saving an electronic copy of the unfilled-in artwork page and drawing the artwork using a software program. I had previously tried, a long while ago, using Microsoft Paint. I got fonts but it was difficult to produce the artwork and I only drew a few characters.

So this morning I tried using Affinity Publisher and the Pen Tool.

Although it was a test I am very pleased with what I produced.

I started by saving from Scanahand a one page unfillied-in artwork page and saved it as a png file.

I then, knowing that that form is A4 in size, or thereabouts, I started an A3 portrait document in Affinity Publiced and did a File Place... and got the form into Affinity Publisher.

I then went to CTRL 4 magnification and found the cell for the letter e and drew at the default line width which I think was 0.2 point, a glyph for a letter e, then using the tools to adjust the shape.

I then made the line 2 points wide. This was a first guess, in fact it worked well.

I the saved the A3 document and exported the form as a new png, with background.

I then used the filled in artwork to produce a font using Scanahand, then I installed the font, directly from Scanahand, and then tried the font at 18 point in a new Affinity Publisher font.

I then had another go, adding glyphs for p, a and l so that I could try to produce a font where a word such as the word apple could be spelled out.

Having tried the concept and got it to work I am hoping to start again and produce what I hope will be a nice font to use.

Scanahand has advanced features, so for a full attempt to produce a font I would produce an unfilled-in form that has light blue guidelines for baseline, x-height, ascender and descender, as Scanahand can disregard such guidelines when using artwork to produce a font.

I am including an image, exported from Affinity Publisher, yet please remember that this is from a proof-of-concept font.

The font is shown at the following point sizes: 8, 10, 12, 14, 18, 24, 36, 48, 72.

William Overington

Saturday 31 August 2019

 

 

 

 

[Alfred]

27 minutes ago, William Overington said:

There is a software program called Scanahand made by High-Logic, a Netherlands-based company.

The font technology used by the online service YourFonts is “powered by” High-Logic B.V.

[janndk]

Great!  

I insert Scanahand templates in Affinity Designer as artboards, so I can work with all characters (two A4 templates next to each other) as one document - but I can still export the templates separately.

This font is created using Affinity Designer (drawing the basic font), Scanahand (converting images to vector) and FontCreator (finalizing the font):
https://www.1001fonts.com/stiff-brush-jk-font.html
 

[Alfred]

15 minutes ago, janndk said:

This font is created using Affinity Designer (drawing the basic font), Scanahand (converting images to vector) and FontCreator (finalizing the font):

Which version of FontCreator do you have? Recent versions can create contours directly from raster images, so you don’t need to convert them to vector as a separate step.

[janndk]

18 minutes ago, Alfred said:

Which version of FontCreator do you have? Recent versions can create contours directly from raster images, so you don’t need to convert them to vector as a separate step.

I use the latest version.

The reason to do it with Scanahand templates and run the process through Scanahand is to convert the whole font all at once (instead of copying and converting every character separately).
 

[Alfred]

17 minutes ago, janndk said:

The reason to do it with Scanahand templates and run the process through Scanahand is to convert the whole font all at once (instead of copying and converting every character separately).

I see, thanks. I’ve never used Scanahand, but I’m sure I’m not imagining being able to select multiple images in an Explorer window and drag them into FontCreator to generate contours for a sequence of glyphs.

[William Overington]

Could you say something about how you produced the artwork for the font in Affinity Designer please?

Apart from a trial period I have not used Affinity Designer, so detail of what you did would be helpful.

For example, did you use a touchscreen and if so, was it with a finger or some sort of stylus, or what?

For my tests I used the Pen Tool in Affinity Publisher, a slow, deliberate process.

At what sort of speed did you draw the characters please? For example, like when using a ballpoint pen during a telephone call and making notes, or like when using an ink pen for lettering something you want to keep.

William

 

[William Overington]

Hello Alfred

As far as I am aware, there is no end result of a font that someone who knows what he or she is doing cannot reach using FontCreator rather than Scanahand.

I have version 4 Professional, which is not the latest version, but as far as I am aware FontCreator can be used to do things which Scanahand cannot.

However, Scanahand has many useful features, both time saving and also helping with things that a user might not know about. For example, if someone draws a glyph for, say a letter e, Scanahand decides how much space each side of the printing part of the glyph there should be to the left and to the right of the glyph, and also sets up the metrics of the font.

The Scanahand template guides someone as to which characters to draw.

However, as I mentioned in the author note document that is linked from the first post in this thread, I did use FontCreator on the result from Scanahand. The original font direct from Scanahand would have been fine to use, but I had the opportunity to add the extra characters as I had FontCreator installed and it was interesting to do,

Also, with the professional edition one can generate one's own templates, so that one can clone the basic two sheet one and add extra characters as one chooses, including Private Use Area characters. So adding a page with cells for designed smart quotes is possible. If I remember correctly originally the ordinary quotes were also copied into the cells for smart quotes, so as to avoid software applications trying to automatically replace basic quotes with smart quotes and ending up not displaying any quote at all.

Williaam

 

[William Overington]

I note that the font Stiff Brush JK font has smart quotes.

Does modern Scanahand include them or was the same technique used that I had used, namely of putting them in the signature cell and then using  FontCreator to move them?

William

 

[janndk]

On 9/3/2019 at 5:18 PM, William Overington said:

I note that the font Stiff Brush JK font has smart quotes.

Does modern Scanahand include them or was the same technique used that I had used, namely of putting them in the signature cell and then using  FontCreator to move them?

William

 

I think Scanahand just did it, by itself.

[janndk]

On 9/3/2019 at 12:12 PM, William Overington said:

Could you say something about how you produced the artwork for the font in Affinity Designer please?

Apart from a trial period I have not used Affinity Designer, so detail of what you did would be helpful.

For example, did you use a touchscreen and if so, was it with a finger or some sort of stylus, or what?

For my tests I used the Pen Tool in Affinity Publisher, a slow, deliberate process.

At what sort of speed did you draw the characters please? For example, like when using a ballpoint pen during a telephone call and making notes, or like when using an ink pen for lettering something you want to keep.

William

 

I drew it using a drawing tablet connected to my pc. Using a just basic vector brush when drawing, and afterwards changing the brush to a special one, and adjusting it a bit.

[William Overington]

I have just noticed a question about this that was posted in the High-Logic forum recently.

https://forum.high-logic.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=8171

It is about the artboard. 

However, @janndk mentions Affinity Designer, and I do not have that program, so it might be that it cannot be done using Affinity Publisher.

Could someone possibly explain please?

There is also a related thread.

https://forum.high-logic.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=8172

William