You will find loads of free XAR files in our 2D Objects section. Any one of these XAR files can be downloaded and exported to EPS format for use in a font or modify them to create custom shapes.

What you will need
For this tutorial you will need Xara Xtreme and TypeTool (or a font creation program which can import EPS files).

A 15 day trial version of Xtreme can be downloaded from Xara. FontLab offers a demo version of TypeTool with no time limit however it does add the FL logo to some characters on export. Fontographer or FontLab Studio will also do the job.

Open Xara Xtreme. A new untitled document appears. Close that document window - from the menu click File then Close.

To open a XAR file you have downloaded click File then Open. Locate the XAR file in the Open Document dialog box. If you have Show Preview selected when you click on the XAR file it will appear on the right. Click Open.

For this example we will use the shape from the Drawing Technique tutorial. Click on the shape to select it as shown below.

To export this shape as an EPS file from the menu click File then Export. In the Export file dialog box select Adobe Illustrator (*.ai;*.eps) as the Save as type. Choose a directory location and give your file a name including the .eps extension then click Export.

Import the EPS files into TypeTool
Open TypeTool and open a new font - from the menu click File then New. From the menu click File then Font Info and here you can record Names and Copyright information. Then from the menu click File then Save As to give your new font a name then click Save.

First we need to set one option before we import our EPS files. From the menu click Tools then Options (or press F10). Under General Options click EPS and bitmap background and select Fit between Ascender and Baseline. This will automatically resize your imported shape to the maximum height.

Double click on the lower a space to open that character window.

From the menu click File then Import then EPS. In the Open EPS File dialog box locate your EPS file then click Open. Our first EPS file has been imported as shown above. You will need to drag the right border line to the right so that the entire shape is in the correct position as shown above.

The default setting is for an outline view displaying the points. If, from the menu, you click View then Show Layers then Fill Outline it will show you the character in full as in the image below.

Generate the TTF
Once you have added all your EPS files Save the file then you are ready to create a TTF file. To generate a truetype (TTF) font from the menu click File then Generate Font. In the Generate Font dialog box tpye in a File name then select your Save as type (TrueType/OpenType .ttf for this example) and locate a directory for the output files then click Save. Install your new font and it is ready to use in any program that supports truetype fonts.