When I worked as a Community Operator at Mechanist Games in China I had the opportunity to draw official comics for Game Of Sultans (a strategy mobile game set in the Ottoman Empire) to be posted on the game's Facebook Page on a weekly basis. Apart from drawing the comics I managed the localisation of the comics - in other words, creating the comics in 6 different languages: English, Turkish, Russian, Indonesian, Polish, and Arabic.
(From left: A panel of a comic strip in English, Turkish, and Polish. Can be found on Game of Sultan’s official Facebook pages / groups, posted in March 2022)
Getting the dialogue translated from English to 5 other languages was easy, we had co-workers from those countries or who were always super friendly and happy to help. But to implement those translated texts into the comics was not so simple. Since the cute fonts that I preferred often did not support special characters that were often seen in Turkish and Polish, the graphic artists simply resorted to using a default font such as Calibri. This mismatch between the comic's art style and the font was quite unbearable for a perfectionist like me, so I took it upon myself to do the job.
So I took the time-consuming route of manually writting in each special character that were unavailable in my font of choice, adding the little dashes, dots, and 'hooks', so that I could maintain the stylistic consistency.
(Left: English; Right: Turkish. Both used the Bakso Sapi font, but the characters underlined in red were manually written)
Looking back now, I wish I had time to look up ways to create and save custom fonts for those special characters - it would certainly be very convenient in the long run. Which is why, today I thought I could look up easy ways to custom fonts.
After some digging around, I have narrowed down to two methods:
The first method is using Fontself plugin alongside Adobe Illustrator.
Because I have been learning Adobe Illustrator recently, this tool seems quite versatile and exciting, however it costs 39 USD, so I think I would hold off considering it until I am sure I want to go deeper into font design.
This is the tutorial I watched: https://youtu.be/-mXsrs71ibM
The second method is using Calligraphr.com, which is MUCH simpler and easier to use!
I found out about this method though a video by Katnipp, it seemed straight forward, and it was FREE, so I wanted to give it a try!
This is the tutorial I watched: https://youtu.be/Ah00ZCoN03o
Calligraphr has templates sheets that can be downloaded and printed out, but because I have a tablet I simply downloaded it as a .PNG file and wrote each character digitally (still with the handwritten quality, except I skipped the printing out and scanning in part).
I then uploaded the completed sheets and BOOM the characters were automatically extracted from the sheets and were now ready to be exported. I had to re-export it a few times because I wasn't happy with the spacing, but the exported .TTF file simply needed to be opened and installed, and it's immediately ready to use on the computer in software such as Powerpoint and Photoshop!
Because I only used the free version which only supported 75 characters, I would consider purchase an upgrade (only 8 USD per month) if I were still working at Mechanist Games.
Nevertheless, I am quite surprised with its results, considering it's made within such a short amount of time and for free! You can see how the font looks below:
Stay tuned for my next blog post - I'm planning to make something a bit more complicated using Calligraphr, and see how far I can go with the free version!
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