The times they are a-changin’.
This post seems to be older than 18 years—a long time on the internet. It might be outdated.
Didn’t know this was even there! How cool! From http://www.pcplus.co.uk/
0Ever looked in vain through various fonts for just the right character? Or wished that one of the characters was a little bit different? Various third-party font editors exist, but did you know that Windows XP and 2000 with Service Pack 2 have a native font editor? I didn’t either until a friend heard about it on the grapevine.
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A message from our sponsorLook for a program called Eudcedit.exe and if you’ve got it, run it. The editing window works like an icon editor, with a pixel grid and basic tools with which to edit designs. Left click to set a pixel, right-click to un-set it.
But who wants blocky pixellated characters? Worry not – although the editor works on pixels, behind the scenes it estimates a vector representation of your work and that’s what gets written to the font file. The vector outline can be seen by going to the View menu and turning on ‘Show Outline’. Guessed outlines of complex curves do not have the quality of a vector created using a gown-up font editor. For straight lines the quality should be fine.
Easier than creating a well-formed character from scratch is to modify a copy of an existing character. Go to Window, Reference. Pick a font and then a character. It will appear to the right of the editing pane. There you can select, copy and paste all or part of the shape.
When saving the new character, it doesn’t replace the original. It goes into a private character set that can be linked to a selected font or with all fonts. Assuming you link to all fonts, the way to use your new character is to bring up the Character Map accessory (Charmap.exe), and in the font list pick All Fonts (Private Characters). You wouldn’t want to design a whole font this way but for it’s fine for a quick hack and there is virtually no learning curve.