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4.6 USING YOUR OWN FONTS
4.6.1 Font design is tedious
A warning: font design is an art. Don't expect to turn out professional-
looking fonts in a few hours.
Sometimes, though, you have to build your own typeface, even if you don't
work with a company in the font-selling business. You may, for example,
want to print your own customized company logo. It means building up
characters within a cell or grid, perhaps 50 dots high and 35 wide — lots of
dots.
Because defining your own typeface is so tedious, make sure you've checked
out as many downloadable fonts as you can find from font development
companies.
The next handiest way to do thejob is to ask around, maybe where you bought
your LaserPrinter 4111, t o see if you can get one of the font-creating or font-
editing utility programs now on the market. FonrGenIV+ is one. Keep an eye
out, too, for new word processing tools that might save you the trouble of
painstakingly figuring out details like kerning.
Even with aids like these, building a custom font is an intricate process. It
calls for the creation of a family of up to 200 characters sharing a common
design and proportional scheme, and that's just for one type size. No mean
feat.
4.6.2 How to download your own fonts
Characters that you define and store yourself are called "user-defined"
characters. Let assume you already know what text is to be in your custom
font, and have designed its type'face,weight, width and style. Once you've
created your own characters. you'll need to download them to your laser
printer.
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