FontLab has been the king of font production for some time now. How long exactly? Four years? Five years? Maybe a lot longer than that? If I were you, I would switch. Upgrading won’t make you a better designer by any means, but it will allow you to get your fonts out onto today’s market much quicker.

Fontourist,

I have been enjoying the best of both worlds for awhile.

I have been using professionally Fontographer since Altsys and John Von Ehr of Texas created the program in the eighties. With every new version, they send out a long detailed questionaire and wish list, where a user could describe his peeves and wishes upon how to improve the program. Over 90% of my wishes were implemented, and I sent them many pages of details.

A few years ago, I upgraded to FontLab at the advice of Paul Nelson, formerly of the Microsoft Typography Group. Now, it is headed by Simon Daniels, here on Typophile.

I use Fontographer for my creative and font editing work, and generate my end results in FontLab, as I find Fontographer’s user interface very intuitive.

Certainly, if FontLab would upgrade Fontographer to have OpenType support, this would be great, but I doubt if FontLab will invest the resources to cause users not to purchase FontLab.

Btw, Fontographer supports Unicode and breaks the 256 character limit for a long time. Support though is terrible. I don’t think that there is an online user group.

So, if you can justtify the investment, you can use both programs, or just patiently learn the FontLab user interface. If you are not a professional, and only use your font creations for personal use, you could always just continue using Fontographer for OSX; similarly, if you don’t need OpenType or the nuances of recent Unicode enhancements in various foriegn languages, then you can just stick with Fontographer.