Thread: Converting fonts

For a Brush

Make a new document (bigger is better), create a new layer and delete the background. Type the letter you want and fit it to the document. Go to Edit > Define Brush Preset and name the brush. It will automatically be added to the end of the brush preset your brush tool currently has selected. To ensure the new brushes are always there simply change the brush preset and when prompted to save your changes click yes, then give the preset a name. You can then load your new preset (it will appear at the very end of your list of brush presets) and clean it up by deleting any Photoshop defaults present.

Hope that helps, I'm not very good at direction. You can always do a Google search for "Define Custom Brush" or "Define Custom Shape".

Actually you're on the right track with the changing to a shape layer - once you have the font outlined, when you convert it to a path (shape) you can save it as a shape, which is exactly what you said you wanted in the first post

That works! I didn't realise there was a define custom shape option. Time to start making the set. Thanks!

Excellent, glad you found it! I just tested it out, and was about to start posting screenshots

Incidentally, the other thing I do for symbol and dingbat fonts is to have a Word document that contains every keystroke on the keyboard, and I open that, highlight the whole thing, then change to the relevant font until I find what i'm looking for. Then I copy/paste into photoshop (I suspect it would work exactly the same in gimp too).

Shape library is cool idea though

By the way, if you're on Windows, don't neglect the Character Map tool! You can find it under Start>Programs>Accessories>System Tools>Character Map

It will show you all of the glyphs in a font and allow you to copy a selected glyph to the clipboard. I find that very few people even know that it's there, but it's tremendously useful whenever you need to type the trademark symbol ™ or some other not-often-used character.

Good point - that's how I get the copyright symbol when I need it