🚀 go-pugleaf

This is a repost (for me anyway) of a message I think may have gotten lost  
by a mail server that died on us the other day. Trying once more to be  
sure:

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I've got some questions about font design that I'm hoping the informed  
people on this newsgroup might be able to help me with. I will summarize  
any e-mail responses.

1) What is the best, or to be less vague, what is the most *professional*  
font design application available on any platform (UNIX, Mac, DOS, etc)?  
I'm assuming the professional font design houses are using stuff other  
than Fontographer or FontStudio (although I've read that Sumner Stone uses  
FontStudio). I'm wondering if people aren't using custom software and if  
any of it's generally available. Perhaps someone can tell me if they think  
FontStudio is better than Fontographer?

2) I am currently using Fontographer, and find it pretty useful, but I'm  
having trouble with creating good font hints for my Type 1 designs. In  
testing the process, I've been re-drawing Times-Roman, based on a template  
of the original. I'm following all the rules about tangent control points  
etc. that supposedly make the Nimbus Q font hinting algorithms work best.  
In comparison to the original, my clone font shares most of the same  
control points just by nature of these rules, and I'm even editing the  
hints manually to achieve the greatest possible similarity to the original  
(as far as I can tell from decoding the Type 1 file in Fontographer). My  
results, however, do not quite match the original, and are not  
particularly great. Adobe's outlines don't rasterize to look as well as  
their hand-tuned bitmap, but it still looks a bit better than what I get  
from Fontographer. 

I'm beginning to assume that font hinting is an arcane process that  
requires font developers to spend enormous amounts of time doing empirical  
tests. We're talking more time than actually drawing the font. Is there a  
better way to build hints (better software?) , so as not to have to resort  
to hand tuned bitmaps?

AK