Fridays at Five - Fun with Personal Fonts

Alright, it's finally Friday... and I'm forced to play the "I have a newborn at home" card again, and apologize for the lack of posts this week. I had forgotten that for the time being, "Sleep every opportunity you can" are the words I have to live by until the little lady gets into a more regular schedule. However, I did want to make sure to give everyone something fun to do over the weekend.

For today's post, I want to share with you an awesome piece of software made by High-Logic called Scanahand. Scanahand takes a simple step-by-step process and turns your hand written text (or hand drawn symbols) into a true-type font. Here's how easy it is...

Step 1, print the template.

Step 2, after printing the template, you simply fill in. In my example, I used a drafting style writing I learned back in high-school.

Step 3, you follow the prompts in the software, and scan the template into the computer. Here's what you see after the scan completes.

Step 4, after clicking "Generate..." the software quickly (less than a minute) identifies each character and assigns it to the font set. When it completes it give you a preview (shown below), and with a click of "Install" you now have access to your personal font in all your applications.

Here's an example of my text. You'll notice that the one drawback (shortcoming) of the software is that you need to be extremely careful about relative alignment of each character on the template, otherwise your final font will have characters that don't necessarily line up. But all in all, this is a great tool - and for the price, I'm not sure it can be beat.

You can purchase Scan-a-Hand from High-Logic for $29, here. Or you can download a free trial version (limited functionality), here.

Have fun with it everybody - and have a great weekend. All the best, Rob