Make your handwritng into a font

Last night while I should have been sleeping, I was thinking about all the cool fonts I have installed over the years. Then I was thinking about how people have told me my handwriting looks super uniform (of course I can see room for improvement, but I'm a bit of a perfectionist). That led me to wonder, how do people make handwriting fonts? I jotted it down to explore this morning. 

Here is how you can do it! 

http://www.myscriptfont.com/

This website turns your handwriting into a font. The best part, they do it for FREE! 

It's super easy, first you download and print this worksheet: 

http://www.myscriptfont.com/res/ScriptTemplate.pdf

Make sure you print it in grayscale or black and white. It turns out much better. 

Then fill it out using a black medium felt tip pen. I used my handy dandy sharpie pen medium. 

Then scan your worksheet at 300-600dpi. I tried using my phone the first time and it was a disaster. I broke out the scanner and it worked beautifully. Here is my scan set at 300 dpi. When I tried to use the 600 setting, the image was too large. 

The bottom part is blank because they are special characters I didn't need. 

Once you have uploaded your scan, name your font and press the start button.

The program will come up with a preview of your font and a download button. 

Download the TTF or OTF file. I used TTF because it was a font file I recognized. I'm not computer handy enough to know the difference. 

Click on the downloaded file and a pop up box will appear. Press the 'install' button. Then you can open up word and search for it by name in your fonts. 

Now your font is ready to be shared! To send it to your friends, send them the TTF or OTF file in an email and they can install your font! Amazing! 

Here is an example of my font. 

I need to do the worksheet a couple more times to perfect it, but I'm pretty excited with how it turned out.