Hi BandA,

The FontLab vs. Fontographer question has been discussed many times here in Typophile. Take a look here.

Good luck!

Scanfont is a very useful application and works with either FontLab or Fontographer. Both Fontographer and FontLab produce professional quality font files but the learning curve on Fontographer is shorter while FontLab gives you more options. Many people use both for various parts of the process.

You can get your feet wet by purchasing TypeTool, and get to know the basic FontLab interface. If you decide you want to move up to the next level, you can purchase an upgrade to FontLab Studio and actually pay a little less than if you had purchased FontLab in the first place.

Nick makes a good point - you can also upgrade to Fontographer from TypeTool

Thanks for this advice everyone - very helpful nick.

There's also FontForge: a freebee that's quite handy for those not willing to fork out anything (like myself!)

Didn't try it yet, but maybe you could check this out, it's free download as it is in beta stage : http://schriftgestaltung.de/glyphs/about.html

@CaleD - It doesn't harm that it is easy to write a program that makes an SFD file -- easy when compared to writing a VFB generator.

Last Friday I woke up very early with the urge to Hack Fonts Fast. Long to short, I hacked together code on the Linux box that converted EGA/VGA screen fonts to SFD, then used FontForge to create a TTF file. Goal achieved.