Digital Immortality For Your Unreadable Chicken Scratch: Turn Your Handwriting into a TrueType Font with YourFonts

I started out as a graphics geek, long enough ago to remember pasteboards and waxers, and to define "font" as something on a strip of Compugraphic film. Then came digital type, and tools like Fontographer that suddenly allowed mere mortals to create their own fonts. Even then, getting your handwriting digitized was a premium service.

Years later, as so often seems to be the case, that which was once the rarefied realm of the professional is a commodity. Fonts are a dime a dozen (or less), and online service YourFonts will convert your unreadable, chicken-scratch handwriting into an unreadable, chicken-scratch font for nothing! Okay, it’ll be digital, but it will still look like you got a C in penmanship.

Quality of your script notwithstanding, YourFonts is a fun little tool. Download their two-page PDF template and follow the instructions for filling out each letter and punctuation block. Then scan the completed pages and upload them to YourFont, and in a few minutes you’ll get back a TrueType font of your very own (including, if you like, a signature and more accented characters than you can shake a stick at).

I’ve done this already with my own handwriting, and it works pretty well. The entire process went without a hitch, if you discount the fact that I started over on the template about three times before I was happy with the result. My plan now is to immortalize my preschool daughter’s handwriting by enlarging the template a bit. We’ll see how that goes. If your geeklet’s a little older, a font of their own would make a neat addition to their computing environment. You could even mux the template to create a DaVinci-esque backward font, or create a code-font by shifting the letters ("decode" by changing the font to Times, of course). Sure, it’s nothing fancy, but whaddaya want for free?

(via LifeHacker)