Hey guys,

I, for some time now, have had an interest in typography and I've been absorbing all I can for the past few years.

I think during the next few months I want to try my hand at designing a typeface and font for my own educational purposes. I just want to see what I can do, and how I can resolve certain issues with creating the letterforms and I imagine that experience will help me understand and be able to better set other typefaces in the future.

So here I am, I've got Adobe CS3, Inkscape at my disposal. I've heard of and used font-forge to view fonts before.

Is there any software that is either free or very cheap that I could use to create an educational font?

if I turn out to like it and have the patience for it, what is the best professional software I could buy to continue my work after that? is there an industry standard for this sort of thing?

I imagine the folks over at dejavu.sf.net would be a great asset as well - besides there and this forum, are there any type-design communities I could check out for additional information and suppourt?

Thanks in advance for everything, I really appreciate the helpful nature of this forum :) and hopefully you'll see some stuff from me in a few months!