Hello

I am new to font making, does anyone know of a good FREE!!! font maker to convert bitmap images into a single font file

It's not possible to create a good font with just a clic on a button.
The fonts are vectorial files, not bitmap.

@Menhir,
owen wants a font generator that accepts bitmaps as input - a good one and for free.
There are good ones for Windows that do that (owen is a Windows 7 user). But those are not free.

I dont know a software that can transform AUTOMATICALY a bitmap to a GOOD font.
If you scan with a coarse resolution, you'll have a bad look for the font.
If you scan with a fine resolution, you'll have a heavy file for the font.

The only good way to transform a bit map to a good font, is what Claude said here :
http://www.dafont.com/fr/forum/read/37061/qui-connaitrait-glyphs
Use the bitmap as a layer and recreate all the letters manualy as vectorial.
It's a long work, not only a conversion.

FontForge is a free software that can do that : http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/

True Menhir, but also not so true.
Starting with a lousy drawing or a lousy scan will produce a lousy font as we can see from the trash popping up over the last years. The usual rubbish in, rubbish out. But whether the starting point is good or not, one way or another it has to be vectorized. Be it by hand or be it by software. Either way it does not really matter that the bitmap used has a large size as it are only the contours being traced and the large bitmap will not be part of the font-file. Thus or you trace by hand, which is, yes, a tedious process or you use a tracer, be it illustrator, Corel Draw, Inkscape or whatever, which result will have to be fine-tuned. Yes, by hand, also a tedious process. But, the sharper the bitmap the less fine-tuning.

An example of lousy artwork vs a good quality high resolution scan with the same font generator with build-in tracer: Letraset's Manuscript Capitals. Above/first FritterDonut's version (which I think is an insult to the original), under/second my interpretation.


So, if we have a good quality bitmap and a font generator that has a build-in tracer and one chooses the correct setting for the tracer we can get a good font-file. That is, good glyphs.

And then the real work starts, correct bearings for each and every glyph, tedious kerning for all possible glyph pairs and the lot.

And, yes, FontForge is a freebee and as Claude said, will in the end produce good glyphs but is rather user-unfriendly and certainly not novice-friendly, taking apart the complicated installation process under Windows. A really complete self-installer and a better user-interface would help. But that, of course, is a general Linux under Windows problem.

http://www.dafont.com/fr/forum/read/24458/unofficial-windows-mingw-fontforge

I thought you or Menhir would mention this but that is not a complete self-installer like one expects under Windows or OS 9 10 whatever. One still needs to find/install other software to make the thing work as it should. In my humble opinion that is not user-friendly let alone novice-friendly.
But, as I am blind, I may be wrong

Ok, J'étais sur Fontographer et j'ai passé à FontForge.
Remarque: I am not able to use Fontlab.

Close, very close if not extremely close, as usual Claude. But was I talking Fontlab?