This is Thought Box post number 300! Many more to come!
I don’t usually do app reviews, since I don’t have my own tablet or smartphone. Today, however, is an exception.
About a month ago, I got the brilliant idea to turn my handwriting into a font. After searching on the App Store for a while, I found iFontMaker, an app available for iPad at $6.99. Initially, the price shocked me. Before searching on the App Store, I had found other websites where you write on a template and their software converts it to a font, for free. Why must this app cost $6.99?
I decided to take the risk anyways, seeing from the screenshots that this was quite a feature-packed app. For the first time ever, I paid for an app.
Pros
Now, after using this app for about a month, I’m almost done designing my very own font, which you can download at the end of this post. The app interface is very intuitive: You just draw the character that appears on screen, press the forward arrow to draw the next character, and so on.
But intuitiveness did not deplete this app from being feature-rich. In the Options screen, you can fine-tune the metrics of your font, such as letter spacing, ascender:descender ratio, and other technical specifications. This is much more than the layman font-maker needs, but could be helpful to professionals.
Unlike many other font making websites and apps, iFontMaker boasts over 2,300 glyphs across multiple languages that you can design in your own handwriting. These glyphs include the entire alphabets of Greek and Cyrillic, Japanese and Chinese characters, as well as hundreds of symbols both practical and ornamental. This fact makes iFontMaker stand far out from the competition, where you’re lucky to find 200 designable glyphs for a higher price.
Did I also mention, that for each glyph, you can move, rotate, and resize the individual strokes with great precision?
Last but not least, y0u can preview your font at any time during the design process. Go to Compose, and you can type out your own sentences to see what your handwriting will look like.
Cons
Despite iFontMaker being a quality app, I do have a few issues with the app. First of all, us humans are not used to writing three-inch-tall letters on a tablet, which this app makes you do. There is a huge difference between writing small and writing large. As a result, the font you make will be different than your actual handwriting. This is true for almost all font-making software, but especially so for iFontMaker.
Secondly, the application displays the glyphs in the background. This introduces some bias. Take for example the lowercase a:
Naturally, we would want to trace that “a” as it appears in the background. However, not all of us write our “a”s a la Helvetica. This is what I mean by bias: the glyph that appears in the background can cause us to change our handwriting to match the font used. One solution to this would be to display the character in a tiny box off to the corner, but unfortunately, there is no such option in the app.
Furthermore, it would be nice to know the names of some lesser-known glyphs, so that we know what we’re writing and not just simply tracing over some funky character.
The Verdict
I give this app a solid 4/5. At $6.99, the value of the app cannot be beat. The sheer number of designable glyphs is by far iFontMaker’s biggest asset. It’s interface makes font design simple for everyone. Just a word of warning though: your font may not exactly resemble your actual handwriting. But it will be the next best thing.
You can buy iFontMaker on the app store at http://itunes.com/apps/ifontmaker.
Download
I promised you a download in the title. Here it is: my very own font, designed with iFontMaker. It’s mostly complete, except for a few sets of Chinese characters. This font set took about 4 hours of leisure time, as I sought to perfect some of the trickier glyphs and replicate my handwriting as accurately as possible.
You can download the font at http://g-liu.com/files/LiuWrite.ttf.
You are free to use the font for personal or small group use, as long as you provide a proper attribution with my name. If you would like to use it commercially, please contact me.
App website
But wait, there’s more! At 2ttf.com, you can see a quick run-down on how to use this app as well as fonts from other users and designers. It’s a great place to look if you’re still unsure about downloading this app.
