[jfk13]

True; but it's perhaps worth noting that FontForge can have a fairly steep learning curve. There may be a place for a significantly easier tool for casual users, if it finds a different balance between power/flexibility and simplicity.

I don't know whether Crossfont gets that right - I haven't tried it - but I can imagine the market niche may well exist.

[dmerfield]

I'm sceptical but more than happy to be wrong. Fonts are surprisingly complicated software and my suspicion is that the market of people who casually want to make them is small.

If someone interested in learning how to make fonts asked me for advice, I'd recommend he invest his time in FOSS software rather than proprietary tools which can (and do) fold and disappear. I've worked through FontForge's Beginners' guide and I'd recommend it to people with even a minor interest in type. You'll learn a lot beyond how to use the software itself:

http://designwithfontforge.com/en-US/index.html

[setr]

Personally, I would be interested in editing fonts, though I have little interest in making one from scratch; eg I like the idea of firacode ligatures, but I don’t care for the entire font (and not all of the ligature designs).

I imagine its too little to bother with picking up font forge, but an MS paint of fonts would be justifiable.

More specifically, I probably have a number of one-off usecases where a simple, shitty editor would be ideal; another example is that I like ascii diagram characters but I have yet to find a font that does all of them well. When using something like latex or monodraw, where I’ll eventually render an image of the text, a half-implented font of 12 characters that can only be built as postscript type 1 with an potentially infinitely recursive ligature definition would be exactly what I’m looking for, and a simple font designer probably gets me 90% of the way there

But I’m probably not a big market either

[neurotrace]

Seconding this. I'm a wannabe hobbyist type designer and I found FontForge to be prohibitively difficult to use. I'm sure it's wonderful once you sink in the many hours needed to learn it but I just want to drag around vectors and try things out. Like you, I don't know for sure if Crossfont hits this sweet spot but I would love it if someone managed to do so.

[jfk13]

Other options you might want to consider -- but at a substantially higher price point -- would be Fontographer or Glyphs.app. In my experience they're substantially easier to get to grips with than FontForge. (I believe they both have free demos available, so you could play around a bit before deciding if you want to spend a couple hundred dollars on this hobby.)