Get "Logo, Font & Lettering Bible" by Leslie Cabarga (Barnes and Noble usually has it) It tells you how to do it in Fontographer or get "Learn FontLab Fast" also by Leslie. Fontographer and Fontlab can be found at Fontlab.com. Typetool also from Fontlab is sort of a Fontlab light and so they have a solution for every price range.

There is also fontifier...

http://www.fontifier.com/

It's free if not always completely satisfying.

ScanFont works pretty good for this sort of thing. It can read in an EPS file and output a FontLab- or FontTool-compatible .VFB file. Which means you also need a copy of FontLab or FontTool to work with it.

Scanfont for Mac imports your scan directly into FontLab - does a pretty good job of tracing into vectors. Scanfont to Fontlab is my standard way of working.

thanks so much, that really helps

well another way,,, a lot better way is to scan and trace in illustrator the paste in fontlab

If I were in your situation, I would look at TypeTool from Fontlab:

http://www.fontlab.com/font-editor/typetool/

It's only $99 and the interface is nearly identical to FontLab. Here is the feature comparison:

http://www.fontlab.com/fontlab-products/compare/

Since you already have the letters in Illustrator as vectors, I would just paste them into whatever program you choose to go with. Otherwise, ScanFont is only $99 more.

Learn Fontlab Fast is worth getting. I will help you get up to speed quickly, and much of the content applies to TypeTool.