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Make a dingbat font with Inkscape

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Buried in Inkscape .47 is the ability to make your own SVG fonts. This isn’t all that exciting because even Inkscape can’t use SVG fonts. However, pair this with a free font conversion tool and you now have a way to create your own TrueType fonts for free! The font creation features are not well developed yet, and there is precious little documentation, but after playing with this quite a while I have finally come up with a set of procedures that works. View/download the tutorial (PDF) here. View the video here. If you develop an original font for digital diecutters, please let me know so I can post it on my fonts page.

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Comments

    • would love a set of these have just bought a craft robot and am looking for nestabilities as I love them.
      thanks for sharing

  2. This is a very cool looking process. FYI, I found this via a link to this post on Cartographer’s Guild. I won’t have time in the foreseeable future to try this process out, but I’m hopeful to give it a shot someday.

    • Stephen, thanks for stopping by and letting me know where you found out about this, so I can say Welcome, Cartographers!

  4. wow, you amaze me, I have wanted to be able to make a nice font, the free creator was fin but I couldn’t get to detailed with the designs, I printed the tut and will try sometime:)

  5. I have had so much fun making fonts since you posted this tutuorial. I know I would never have figured it out without your help! Thanks for taking the time to not only figure it out, but explain it so nicely that we can do it too!

  6. Thanks Kay. Looks like I might need to upgrade from O.46. Been holding off with some of the compatability issues thought.

    • Lots of people keep both. Just install to different folders. .46 quit working for me months ago so I didn’t have any choice,

  8. Great tutorial – really good insight into something I thought INKSCAPE could do, but had no idea where to start. Now i can get some logo’s in as fonts.

    I came from the INKSCAPE forum…. btw.

  9. Great!
    I’ve been looking for some infos about the SVG Fonts in Inkscape and so I came to your blog.
    Great infos here, thanks.
    I hope I will be able to use the SVG Font feature and also hope the guys from Inkscape will develop it further on.
    I am playing with a digital tablet and the font6s would be some sort of calligraphic style.
    Thanks once again.

  10. The online converter operation has changed since your tutorial came out. It no longer returns an archive, just your file.among other changes. You might want to update the instructions.

  11. Hello,

    Thanks for the .svg file. How did you create it?
    when creating a new inkscape file, I am unable for instance to enter a matching string, how did you do that?
    I created a font with only lower cases and it worked very well but I am unsure on how to add a “white space” glyph.

    Thanks again!

    • Jean,
      Basically you click once so that glyph’s line is highlighted, then click again on that same line and in the “matching string” column. You will get an insertion box where you can type the character. Then press return. I found it to be temperamental, which is why I just made the svg instead of explaining it.
      I need to go back and add a space character to that file. Thanks for reminding me.

  12. Hallo thank you for Tutorial but I have problem that can´t download the fontstarter.svg file.
    Thank you
    Andrew

  13. In your video tutorial (which lead me to this post) you mentioned something about an xml editor to change the name of the ttf file converted from Online Font Converter. I can’t find that info. Can you please direct me to it? Thanks.

  14. Hi, great tutorial! I always wanted to be able to create my personal fonts via Inkscape and this page has been extremely useful.
    I hope you don’t mind if I write an italian translation of the instructions – obviously with reference to the original article.

    One question: does anybody know how to set the different width of every single character so to create non-monospaced fonts? 🙂

    • Bluefox, thanks for the translation and the link. You can set the letter spacing under the “kerning” tab, but that is out of scope for my knowledge and this tutorial.

      • If anyone figures out “kerning” (inkscape just freezes when i try to “add pair” to play with it for me :-/ ) I would LOVE to know!

  15. t h a n k y o u s o m u c h ! ! !

    Your SVG font files and video are a HUGE help.

    I hope that someone helps you in a like way very soon.

    All the best, Matthew

  16. Hi – I see the link to my dingbat map on this site and just wanted to say that my sitewill be moving soon. If you want to use the dingbat map in the future, the new link is pinellaswebvertising.com/di​ngb​atm​ap.​htm

    (I see no way to contact this blogger, so I hope the link on this site can be updated, as well.)

    Enjoy!

  17. When you are creating a font do you have to leave the already used graphic on the screen after you have used it?

    Also in your video you said to size them all together mine are already the same size can I size them individually when I get them on screen?

    Thank You For Everything !!!

  19. Thanks for the video tutorial. I somehow could not get my fonts uploaded into the online font converter. After clicking “select fonts”, I get an error from the website saying “Server I/O error”.

    At first, I thought it was my file being corrupted but I even tried to upload the fontstarter.svg and got the same error. Is it really a server error or am I missing come critical step?

    thanks for helping !

    • If the online font converter is giving you trouble, you can also download FontForge and convert the sgv-file to a ttf-file on your computer.

      FontForge looks both daunting and hell ugly, but once you’ve opened the sgv-file with FontForge, just go to /File/ and select /generate font/ , give it a name and save it.

  20. Sorry to bother. I managed to solve the problem with the downloading. It was my internet connection not set right.

    thanks for the great tutorial.

  21. Hi… is there any way to do something like this with Adobe Illustrator?? I designed a typography in this program and would like to save it as a font.

    • Not that I know of, but you can probably export the glyphs for import into Font Forge, which is free, open source font making software.

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