Yes to both. If you want a custom font designed, we can do that. Designing cursive fonts from scratch is not cheap - figure on $3,000 as a ballpark number. Manuscript font families are about a third of that. We can modify any of our products in any way you want, and can tell you when things will get expensive.
For your custom font, the better your starting examples, the less it will cost. A consulting company in Mexico asked us to design a font to be used in Mexican schools, optimized for Spanish accents. Their direction to us included an Adobe Illustrator file showing all the basic cursive letters, number, and punctuation. The font was designed and delivered to them for $2,000. But realize that they had excellent examples of what they wanted, and had very few corrections required along the way. They were very good to work with.
Dave Thompson is our font designer, and has designed and implemented all the 580+ fonts we offer -- except Morse Code, which was designed and implemented by his daughter, Kelly, who now runs the office. Dave even did the Russian Cursive, with a lot of help from a visiting Russian student. If you are serious about wanting a custom font, contact Dave directly at dave@educationalfontware.com
A well-behaved cursive links smoothly from one letter to the next, using graceful curves that we (and the dictionary) call ligatures. These ligatures need to be inserted between base (stripped down) letters, and are specific for each pair of letters. That is, the ligature between a and b is quite different from the ligature between b and a. All the logic of selecting which ligature connects each pair of letters has been coded into a program we supply called -- appropriately -- LinkLetter. Each font family has a different LinkLetter and they are NOT interchangeable. Using Linkletter is very easy. Do your typing using the cursive font, Select the text to be linked (highlight it), Cut from the Edit menu, run LinkLetter, and Paste. The resultant text will look gorgeously connected. If you change the font, however, it will look like gibberish. Pages 5 and 6 of the User Guide describe the process in more detail. The linking process takes less than 10 seconds to do.
Designing, coding, and debugging LinkLetter is included in the price of designing a cursive font.
Our manuscript fonts have acute accent, grave accent, circumflex, tilde, diaeresis or umlaut mark, ring, cedilla, ae, oe, o slash, and German double s. Only the DN font family has French, Spanish, and German accents available in cursive. DN_EUROP.PDF is the sample sheet of the European variations for our DN family. Spanish accents are particularly easy.
For a custom font, we can include any accents you specify.
We've been in business since 1994; this is a home-based business that has been our major source of income. We try very hard to treat our customers as we would like to be treated. We offer an unconditional Lifetime Money Back Guarantee on our products. One or two people a year request their money back, which we refund promptly. We also give refunds to teachers who have purchased our fonts for themselves, and whose schools have purchased a Site License. As of April 2007, our fonts are in more than 20,000 U.S. schools,
8,000 homes, and in several foreign countries. So, yes, that's pretty reputable. If you want a local-to-you reference, we can probably supply you with one.
Yes, we do support publishers in their use of our fonts! We will convert the normal TrueType fonts to PostScript for one font family, at no cost, if you purchase a Site License.
We do not claim any kind of copyright on anything you produce using our fonts, provided that your product does not include our fonts in a usable electronic form. That is, anything on paper or video is free game, but anything electronic should be such that the purchaser of your product does not get full use of our fonts for free.
You can use our fonts to produce printed material, and you can furnish our fonts to your printer for the purpose of producing your material. The printer cannot use the fonts for someone else.
We ask that the publisher/author include a small blurb in the legal area to the effect that "The fonts used in producing this book can be purchased from Educational Fontware, Inc, 1-800-806-2155." Including this is not required - but we would like your customers to know where to get our fonts.
Call 1-800-806-2155 (our free Tech Support and order number). We take orders over the phone. We're near Seattle, WA, Pacific time zone.
Fax 1-877-729-9810
Print our order form and mail (7011 Fremont Ave, Seattle,
WA 98103) or fax (1-877-729-9810) it to us. Order
Form
Send us e-mail: efi@educationalfontware.com