Ask HN: How to develop a font for experimental punctuation project?

Then there’s FontForge², which is by far the most evolved, feature-heavy project, but until recently had bad UX/UI and was a pain to install and run on OSX. It seems, that’s changed, though.

FontLab³ still is the type design “industry”’s de facto standard font editor, but development lags behind, and it’s quite expensive for a hobby project.

There are a few other proprietary offerings, notably the DTL FontMaster⁴ tool suite. But Glyphs⁵ seems to be going the winner, steadily taking over market share from FontLab.

If you like scripting your designs (esp. in Python) you should definitely try RoboFont⁶.

When you’re looking for volunteers/collaborators on your project, then do check in at Typophile⁷. For over a decade, it’s the principal outlet for all things type and type design: on the fora you’ll meet some very knowledgable experts always willing to help.

Since you mentioned punctuation, I suppose you’re familiar already with the _Shady Characters_⁸ project (and its companion book⁹). As for a detailed history, I can highly recommend Malcolm B. Parkes† authoritative monograph on the subject, too.

¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafont ² http://fontforge.github.io ³ http://www.fontlab.com/font-editor/fontlab-studio ⁴ http://www.fontmaster.nl ⁵ http://www.glyphsapp.com ⁶ http://doc.robofont.com ⁷ http://typophile.com ⁸ http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk ⁹ Keith Houston, Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks. W. W. Norton, 2013. † Malcolm B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: Punctuation in the West. University of California Press, 1993.

[1] https://fontforge.github.io/en-US/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_Areas

It's a grid-based system that gives you predefined shapes to build with. It's very easy to get started and you can create some really amazing fonts with it.