Turn SVGs into Fonts
date
Jan 19, 2026
type
Post
year
slug
svg-to-font
status
Published
tags
Font
GlyphSmith
Vector
Design
summary
If you can export SVGs, you can now make a font!
Every few years I feel the need to create a font. I’ve got some experience - I’ve done font design at the university, I’ve done the occasional font for work, but I don’t do font design enough to keep up with all the latest tools. So as it turns out, my license of FontLab 5 no longer runs on modern Macs. I didn’t want to spend big bucks on a FontLab 8 license, especially since I didn’t need 90% of the features in FontLab anyway. And that got me thinking…
- We have great inexpensive tools for creating vector graphics (Affinity is fantastic and now free, Inkscape is free and open source).
- We have great open source command line tools for manipulating fonts (fonttools is a python tool that can pretty much do it all).
All it really needs is for someone to make it all work together and build a nice user interface around it!
And when have I ever shied away from spending a month of evenings and weekends on a niche side-project?
And that’s how GlyphSmith was born.
Create your individual Glyphs in any vector design software, export them as individual single-path SVGs, then drop them into GlyphSmith.
Adjust side-bearings, scale, and vertical offset for each Glyph, then switch to the Kerning tab and adjust all pairs that need adjusting.
Done! Export as OTF, TTF or webfont (WOFF, WOFF2).
To make it as easy and quick as possible, you can interactively change the relevant values by clicking and dragging directly in the Glyph or Kerning view.
All changes are immediately reflected in the Font Preview - and you can even click on Glyphs and Kerning Pairs in the Font Preview to edit them.
See two characters that are too far apart? Click on them, click and drag in the Kerning view to adjust, done!
This was a really fun UX project. If you can export SVGs, you can now make a font!
Out on the Mac App Store and on ➡️ https://glyphsmith.app. Free version available - limited to 10 Glyphs, but sometimes thats all you need.
