Like some of the other software we reviewed, the premium version of Scanahand offers few options when it comes to font editor functions. But there are quite a few tools in this font creator that set it apart from its peers, and from higher-end font designers as well.

For starters, Scanahand is, hands down, the best handwriting-to-font application we found. This is due mostly to its printable templates. You simply choose one of four pre-designed glyph templates, or create your own, based on how many and what kind of glyphs you need. You can easily create a font with a little more than 200 glyphs in most cases, or 400 or so if you’re working with dingbats. One of the templates has blank boxes, so if you can’t find the glyph you want to create in the existing templates, you can create a new template based on the one that includes blank boxes and add whatever other glyphs you need.

After choosing a template, you print it off and draw your characters, leaving blank any boxes for characters that you don’t wish to include. The boxes have guidelines for ascender, descender, x-height and baseline already drawn in on the sides, so you can ensure that your characters will be uniformly sized. These guidelines can be altered in the software before printing, if you want to do so. If the guidelines aren’t quite enough, you can print off an additional guide sheet to place behind your drawing sheet for extra help.

Then you scan your image directly into the software. The bitmap image is turned into a font, with font metrics automatically generated. Unfortunately, you can’t change the metrics or adjust kerning, but for a beginner, this usually is not a problem. The software also lacks drawing tools to make minor glyph tweaks, so if you need to change a letter, you’ll need to re-print a template, re-draw it and re-scan it.

From there you just have to name your font, save it and install it. This font creator saves as OpenType fonts, which is a vast improvement over the outdated bitmap fonts that other basic font creator and editor applications usually use. You can even test the font before you save it, to make sure that everything looks as it should.

We found Scanahand to be incredibly easy to use, thanks to its simple three-step workflow and well-organized layout. There was no point at which we found ourselves lost or confused as to what step came next – something that can’t be said of some of the higher-end font editors we reviewed.

Help and support options are well-represented. Even though Scanahand is simple to use, the user manual provides a good level of detail, and the welcome screen presents help options like FAQs, a user forum and an email address. Online support options include all these, as well as a few written tutorials and a phone number, though it is international and therefore may not be accessible to some U.S. users.