Font Design

Font designers will be pleased to know that there is a free online Autotrace tool that can be used to rasterize images or sketches of individual glyphs into SVG vector format. It is based on the Open Source AutoTrace program. The free online tool can be found here: http://www.roitsystems.com/cgi-bin/autotrace/tracer.pl. It will recognize and support most image formats, although it is recommended to use TIFF, PNG or JPEG file formats.

Simply browse to an image file on your local computer and submit the online form. It will output the converted image as an SVG file which can be saved to your local drive. The file can be loaded into Adobe Illustrator and saved in native Illustrator AI or EPS format. These formats are very portable and can be edited and imported into FontLab, Fontographer or other font editing program.

The AutoTrace program is very impressive. Sample screenshots are available here at this link: http://autotrace.sourceforge.net/index.html#screenshots. There are comparisons with other programs (Comparison of tracing a small m with AutoTrace and other programs, Comparison of tracing small circles with AutoTrace and Scanfont and Comparison of tracing letters with AutoTrace and Scanfont).

It is interesting to note that one of the aims of the developers is to make AutoTrace better than ScanFont 3.0.