Fontify

Make your own typeface from your handwriting!

• Download a PDF template to print and fill with a not too fin black pen,
• Scan it with DPI >= 300,
• Upload your beautiful handwriting to the webapp,
• It creates a TrueType font, and let you preview it,
• If you are happy, save it and start to use it!
• See this demo showing how a font generated with Fontify can look, on a website, a LaTeX document or slideshows, or slides made with Marp.

Warning

:boom: I will not try to run the app somewhere online.

:raised_hand_with_fingers_splayed: If you want to use Fontify, you need a laptop under Debian or Ubuntu (or maybe Mac OS X or a virtual machine under Microsoft Windows), with Python installed, and use the instructions explained below.

Demo

Here are a few screenshots of the webapp:

1. Print the template	2. Upload the scanned template

It generates the font and you can preview it

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Development (only on Debian/Ubuntu)

• It only works on Python 2, so far (but I’m almost sure it would also work for Python 3).
• I will try to set up a Docker image to ease this experiment… maybe.

1. First clone and cd into the repository, fetch the third-party dependencies.

cd /tmp/
git clone https://github.com/Naereen/fontify
cd fontify
git submodule init
git submodule update

1. Install all the dependencies.

sudo apt-get install potrace imagemagick fontforge fontforge-extras wkhtmltopdf python-opencv python-fontforge  # try to use 'brew' on Mac OS X ?
npm install -g ttf2woff
sudo pip2 install --upgrade virtualenv

1. Activate a virtualenv and start the app!

virtualenv env
source env/bin/activate
type pip python   # check that this is the local ones
pip install -r requirements.txt
python hello.py  # or 'make rundebug'

1. And open the app to use it!

firefox http://0.0.0.0:5000/ &

1. Note: in “development mode”, the app is relaunched whenever a file is modified. Use make run to run “in production” mode.

2. To open the app to anyone on Internet, you can use ngrok (:boom: and also, be crazy, as this app has NO GUARANTEE TO BE SECURE):

ngrok http 5000

1. There is also a XeLaTeX file showing how to use a custom font in a LaTeX document, and here is how it looks.

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:scroll: License ?

This (small) repository is published under the terms of the MIT license (file LICENSE). © Lilian Besson, 2018.