Fontographer has not been updated for more than five years and is unlikely ever to be updated again. It is not in development, and is becoming more obsolete all the time. It makes reasonably good -- although far from perfect -- Type 1 PS fonts, but the quality of its TrueType fonts is not very good, and you have very little control (it exports TT fonts as conversions, only letting you work in a PS outline and hinting environments).

If you are looking for a less expensive option, check out TypeTool from the makers of FontLab. It is a stripped down version of FontLab that is better for TT development than Fontographer.

What the other guys said.

Plus, it's just such a striking difference between an app that has huge bugs and hasn't had even a bug fix in about 6-7 years, versus one that gets constant updates and is really responsive to user needs and requests.

FontLab/TypeTool are harder to learn, but they are far more capable, while Fontographer seems like an all-but-dead product.

T

I've been enlightened. I'll cut my teeth on TypeTool2 and move on to full FontLab later. Thanks for the advice, and to Stephen Coles for steering me toward typophile.com

I understand all of the complaints re Fontographer, crummy manual, no updates, no plans to revise, but it was the program of choice for thousands?hundreds of designers and millions or maybe just thousands of fonts were created using it. Yes, a pity that it is not updated, but I still use it, though am getting Type Tool2 now.

It was not the 'program of choice': for a long time it was pretty much the only program readily available, particularly on the Mac. Unless you happened to be one of the lucky people with an old copy of Font Studio, there was no choice.

There was another program around in the mid 80s, Ikarus, and it was expensive although it was very good. The Dutch Type Library includes it as a part of the current DTL FontMaster which operates using Mac OS Classic and Windows. Yes, Type Tool 2 is a very good choice. I believe the Windows version of Fontographer first appeared in 1992 or so, after the Mac version.