Hi Staggers—

One of the areas that the Fonts and Typography section of tg addresses is fixing fonts, and if we stretch our imagination a little, I believe that building fonts falls into the general category. I posted a longish tutorial, a step-by-stepper, for FontLab, which more or less has the same UI as Type Tool >>> here <<< .

If you're good at 1.)tedium and 2.) following steps, I feel that Type Tool 3 might be your ticket, because the I/O between Xara and Type Tool is a good one. I've been using Font Lab since version 1 and can state without fear of contradiction that its drawing tools are harder than Xara's. At the same time, I acknowledge what you stated about you not personally doing the characters—you need Illustrator format for the characters, myfile.AI, and Xara can export to AI as clean as genuine Adobe Illustrator can.

In fact, a $4000 modeling program such as Autodesk Maya doesn't have the drawing tool ease that Xara has.

No, I played with FontCreator Pro, and yI see almost nothing that justifies the extra $100 over Type Tool. Type Tool is just a little gem; if you have the patience, you can generate a near-commercial quality font from it.

My Best,

Gary