Can I create a font from JPEGs?

wake6

Hi

I have taken some photographs that I now have in JPEG format (from RAW files) of things that are letter shaped eg a bicycle wheel for the letter “o”, a tall thin building for the letter “I”. I thought it would be fun to use them to create pictures that used these letters as text.

I could use Photoshop Elements to import the jpegs individually and arrange them on the canvas. But it occurred to me that if I wanted to do a lot of these pictures it may be easier if I could use the JPEGs to create a bitmap font that I could then just type with.

I realise that such a font would not be scaleable. I also realise that I would probably couldn't use it in a conventional word processor (or not one from the last 20 yrs anyway!).

I have done quite a lot of Googling on this but keep coming up with programs for creating vector fonts which is not what I want to do. I have found something called BitFonter but it costs $149 which is more than I wanted to pay for what is just a bit of fun.

I am using a Mac.

Does anyone know of any cheaper/free products that would achieve what I want (I already have Photoshop CS3, Illustrator CS3 and Photoshop Elements 11 and Lightroom 4)?

Thank you

Big_Graeme

Fonts are vectors on the whole, what you are trying to do can't really be done as a font unless you vectorise the images.

Mr_Toad

Top two hits for create font from jpg

http://www.ehow.com/how_7268239_convert-jpg-truetype-font.html

http://www.wikihow.com/Create-a-Font

Mr_Toad

And FontForge is free and available for the Mac.

http://fontforge.github.io/en-US/

wake6

Mr_Toad wrote: »

Top two hits for create font from jpg

http://www.ehow.com/how_7268239_convert-jpg-truetype-font.html

http://www.wikihow.com/Create-a-Font

Thank you for showing an interest in this. Unfortunately this methods and others that I found involve converting a bitmap to a monochrome vector image. I'm pretty sure that that would result in something unrecognisable compared the original colour JPEG photo if it would convert at all?

wake6

Mr_Toad wrote: »

And FontForge is free and available for the Mac.

http://fontforge.github.io/en-US/

Thank you for this. However, I have had a look at the documentation and it seems to be for designing fonts with its built in vector drawing program rather than importing a JPEG. It does say that it can export bitmap fonts though.

Maddybee33

The short answer is 'no'. However, if your photoshopping skills are very good there is a website that was recommended to me by my comics tutor called Your Fonts (I TRIED to give you a link, but MSE won't let me do that- it's yourfonts . com) which should let your create the font, provided you align it all correctly. I think that you pay around $5 for the font, then you get to keep it.
I hope this helps!