Hi, I am trying to create a font with one image. That is all I need. I'm using font forge but I don't have enough experience and it is very confusing. I have added the character and generated the font but it doesn't work. I can't add the image but it looks kind of like this: // but more slanted. I created the image in illustrator and have tried copying and pasting to font forge and importing as jpg. I don't know what else to do.

Try saving the .jpg image as a monochrome bitmap, before you try to try to import it into Fontforge. Even if your .jpg looks black and white, if you enlarge it eight times, you'll see random coloured pixels, (beige, light and dark grey, etc.). You need to use a one colour source image for a font.

Do I need to save it as a monochrome bitmap directly from illustrator? What is the file extension for that?

Why not draw it directly in FontForge? I think it would make things easier that way.

If you prefer to do the drawing in Illustrator, save it as a vector file and import the vector in FontForge. I am not sure what vector formats FontForge recognizes but IIRC claudeserieux mentioned SVG before. I also do not know if FontForge will accept a cut and paste of vector outlines directly from illustrator like Fontlab does. Claude regularly uses FontForge and might be able to tell you exactly how to do the vector import.

But if it concerns making a font from an image and its intricacies, metaphasebrothel is the right person to ask.

.png

I saved it as a png but if I zoom in it still has gray pixels.

Import the vector -> svg basic 1.1

That's because the .png faithfully reproduced the grey pixels created by your .jpg image. I don't use illustrator, but it should have a File command to save as -> monochrome bitmap. (file extension .bmp) Note: .bmp files can be 24 bit, 256 color, 16 color or monochrome. They all have the same .bmp extension. In MS Paint, you would do File -> Save As... -> Monochrome Bitmap (*.bmp*.dib). Surely Illustrator ought to be able to do that.

The other option is to save the Illustrator file as an SVG, then use www.freefontconverter.com to convert the SVG to a TTF file. This TTF will open just fine in FontForge.