Create custom character symbols as a font

Question

Hello,

I am trying to create a custom character marker symbol in the form of a font but I really cannot figure out how to do it. We have several custom symbols in the form of EMF files which we use to symbolize electrical devices. We need to change it to be characters rather than an image. I tried to use Inkscape to transform each image into a font character but nothing works. Those symbols have gaps and some lines are not connected. According to the font rules, the object should be a closed path. But I also see a lot of default ESRI fonts that include symbols with gaps so there should be a way.

I spent a full day trying to find the way to transform the symbols but unfortunately could not find the solution. Anyone has any tips on how should I proceed is this task? Below is one example of the symbol. Many thanks.

mykola · Answer

Yeah, I did all possible manipulations with changing to path and union but it seems like there is still some issues. I am looking at FontForge now, thanks for pointing out to this option. Hopefully it makes things easier. The images were an easy solution because in addition to the ease of use, it also had a solid background which hid the line that was drawing into a vertex in the middle of the image. Now, with the font character being without a background, additional steps should be considered.

jcarlson · Answer

In Inkscape, what about selecting everythign and using Path -> Union?

Edit to add: If those are lines in your symbol, you may need to convert the stroke to a path first.

I wouldn't trust an online conversion to do something as particular as this. You might need to get a font editor like FontForge (which is free and open-source!) to generate the font yourself.

mykola · Answer

We had it as a picture marker but is has some issues in Arcgis Pro and Map Viewer so I received a request to change it into a font character. I followed some tutorials about font creation in Inkscape with having everything as SVG and then converting to the true type font with some online font converter. Unfortunately, I cannot even create one symbol as a glyph because Inkscape does not allow it. Not sure what is going on. Group, ungroup, split path, combine path, etc etc etc. and still cannot produce what I need.