Building Your Font
Building turns your drawings into a real font file. It's the step that goes from "a collection of shapes" to "a font you can type with".
How to Build
Go to the Build page and tap Build. If you've just arrived on the Build page and there are unbuilt changes, the build starts automatically.
What Happens During a Build
FontCraft sends your glyph drawings to the backend (a Python service running fontTools). It assembles the paths into a font binary and packages the TTF, WOFF2, and OTF files. The whole process runs asynchronously, so you can watch the status update in real time.
Build status:
- Draft: no build has run yet
- Processing: building now, usually 5 to 15 seconds
- Ready: build complete, font is downloadable
- Failed: something went wrong (try rebuilding)
The Live Preview
Once a build completes, a large text area shows your font rendered live. The text is editable: click or tap and type anything you like. Try "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" to see every letter.
Use the font size slider to preview at different sizes (24px to 160px). A font that looks good at 36px might have spacing issues at 120px, or vice versa. Check both.
[SCREENSHOT: FontCraft Build page with the font size slider moved to a large size, showing headline-scale text]
Iterating
If you see something you want to fix after building (a letter that looks wrong, spacing that's off), go back to Draw or Refine, make the change, and build again. The build loop is fast. Most fonts need 2 to 4 rounds before they feel right.
Changes on the Draw and Refine pages also trigger a background auto-build, so by the time you switch to the Build page your latest changes are usually already processed.
Adding Font Metadata
Before downloading, fill in your font's metadata: the family name (what apps show in the font picker), your name as the author, and optionally a copyright line and website. This information is embedded in the font file itself, so anyone who opens it sees the correct attribution.
See Exporting your font for the download steps.