Hey. I haven't designed type for around 10 years. At that time I was working with Fontlab 5 and it seemed enough for me with some caveats (interpolation, auto hinting.. and so on). Coming back to the design I've found myself against a wall. Tried the Fontlab 7 but all seems so complex, so hard to get into. After re-designing my type logo there, it seemed like it took me longer than expected but at the same time I've used new features. There isn't much tutorials regarding Fontlab 7 which makes it even harder to take on.
Anyway, the main thing that pushes me towards Fontlab 7 is the ability to run on something besides Mac Os. When I tried Glyphs some time ago it did seem to have some major features and simple enough to use but only Mac Os. So... What is the consensus nowadays on the community regarding font design software? Is even there a third alternative? Not talking about fontforge which is buggy, a "real" one.
I'm a developer by the way but I don't see where that could help me out on font design.
Comments
For type drawing software I'm not the right guy to give advice. I use FontForge (crashes often) for small tasks. FF is a big heap of bugs, as fontutils is. I prefer Font::TTF written in Perl by SIL, but restricted to TTF file format. It fits very well in my toolchain written in Perl and C.
I can’t think of another serious option at that point, that is ready for prime time and suffers none of those limitations. Maybe in another year or three.
I've been using FontLab 7 for a bit and seems it has a high learning curve but in the end it could be interesting. I don't get why you can't use "parameters" in general location fields like you can for example with Fusion360. Actually that is a very good piece of software that every developer (including myself) should take a look into. It would be awesome because then you would be able to easily change things around the font. Things like stem width, smart corners... I haven't got it to work yet even on the "computed" fields which don't make much sense for me to exist.
EDIT: After checking a bit more that Type 3.2, it does seem the only advantage over lets say FontLab 5 is the price and in general I would rather just use FontLab 5, I think specially since I'm more used to it.