FontMaker vs Runebender

FontMaker turns handwriting, drawings, SVG files, and images into downloadable fonts. Users can photograph a handwritten page, draw characters with a mouse, finger, or stylus, or import files. It traces PNG, JPG, GIF, and WebP images into vector glyphs. Each glyph can be adjusted for baseline, size, and left and right spacing, with a live preview while typing. Export formats are OTF, TTF, and WOFF; the maker lists Photoshop, Word, Canva, Figma, and Procreate as compatible uses, and says WOFF is for websites. FontMaker says processing happens in the browser and that fonts and files are not uploaded to its servers. The free plan costs nothing and exports 26 lowercase or uppercase characters for personal use. FontMaker Pro Monthly costs $3.99 a month; FontMaker Pro for life costs $19.99, paid once. Both paid plans allow all characters and commercial use. FontMaker Studio is described as available for iPhone, iPad, and Android, with drawing, scanning, and TTF export.

Runebender is a free font editor for UFO and Designspace sources, with tools for glyphs, paths, filters, components, anchors, masters, interpolation, spacing, kerning, feature code, color fonts, text shaping, font information, and font checking. It opens UFO and Designspace files, Glyphs files and packages, and compiled TTF or OTF fonts; Glyphs files are converted to UFO, while compiled fonts are opened as UFOs in memory. Babelfont packages can also be imported. Experimental local models can suggest a heavier glyph master from a lighter one, and local chat is available through font-ml. The browser editor runs on the user's machine without uploading files, but it has interaction gaps and is not recommended for real work. The native application has no packaged release and is installed from source with Cargo. Runebender is alpha software and writes UFO and Designspace files in place, so the documentation advises working on copies and keeping sources under version control. The project is licensed Apache-2.0 or MIT and maintained independently, not as an official Linebender project.