Originally, this was going to go into the Mac Software forum, because as I understand it, this isn’t supported on other platforms as widely. However, I know that there are people here who will be interested who are using other systems, so it can go here.
As you are most likely aware, I have been documenting the metal street name plates in Chelmsford. The photo side of that is pretty much done, but the original aim was to create a useable typeface from those letters. That’s ongoing and I am getting encouraging results. However, a friend asked me the other day what it would look like if you took the photos and set words using them as a source. An interesting idea, and worth a go. Conincidentally, I had just been reading how the Emojii font that ships in more recent versions of Mac OSX (and iOS) is, infact, a proper typeface by instead o carrying outline glyphs, its using PNGs. Someone had reverse engineered that and written a nice Python script that builds you a bitmap font from a folder of photos.
Obviously, I had to have a go. And here is what I have at the moment, in Text Edit.
This is editable text - I can type and these characters appear in the editor window. It seems that as long as your application supports it, you can use it.
If you want to have a go, here is the page I started on:
http://typophile.com/node/103268
This requires that you have Python installed on your Mac. You will also need to install Numpy (a Python addon), and FontTools. This will require a little bit of mucking about in Terminal to get these running.
When you’ve set up, you’ll need to edit the XML file for your font - an example is supplied on the page I linked to above - convert it to a True Type file (using the TTX commend in Terminal), and then run the Python script to build the final typeface file.
It is, obviously, a long job. You also need to source enough bitmaps for your typeface - get them to a useable size etc. etc.. It is maddening, but the results can be interesting.
As I said, it seems that Windows may have problems with this kind of font. It is recommended that you supply outlines for that platform (so something is displayed), but the XML will obviously get huge fast, so I’m not dong that myself. The demo files have examples of this.