#DDBwerkbank: Create computer fonts by yourself

It's hard to believe, but it's amazingly easy to create your very own and great looking computer fonts!

The easiest way is to use a template – for example from the Deutschen Digitalen Bibliothek (German Digital Library) or from the Deutsches Zeitungsportal (German Newspaper Portal). Anyone can do it!

I also managed to do this, for example:

It's surprisingly simple to create your own fonts - with the ddb-werkbank and the software birdfont

Convinced yet? Go ahead: We've created a couple of short tutorials, below, to help you learn how to typeset such fonts using the free software  Birdfont (thanks to its author, Johan Mattson!).

By the way: You are welcome to download my font, and install it on your own word processing program: Download font "sachsenspiegel";[1]

(I used the Heidelberger Exemplar of the "Sachsenspiegel" as a template.)

1. Let's start!

2. Templates can be found in the DDB

3. Birdfont: Installation and first steps

4. Ligatures

5. "Kerning" and "Spacing"

6. And now it's your turn!

[1] But beware: Because of my medieval template, some of the characters used today (e.g. the "q") are missing in the sentence - not to mention most of the punctuation marks! However therefore other characters which are not used today can be found: e.g. the "long 's'", Latin numbers, or abbreviations. If you want to use the font in Microsoft Word, you may have to turn on ligatures first. Here, you can find out how: https://bork.blog/2019/02/20/word-ligaturen/