Resources for making fonts!
Designing letters
Here's a graph that shows what letters you can "cannibalize" when you want to design some other letter. For example, for Y, you want to take elements from I and also V, which is why those two other nodes point to Y. Or what letters you can make from another letter. For example, v can be used to make y and w, which is why those two "come from" the v node.
The graph is interactive! You can hover over a letter or a number in the graph below to highlight what characters can be made from it, or how it can be created from other characters. The O H n o nodes has been highlighted in cyan as those letters are commonly how you start making a font.
Please note, that this is just ONE possible graph of deriving lots of characters from other characters. There are many ways to do this, of course depending on your specific designs and what you want to go for.
View the graph's source code.
Rendered with the command dot -Tsvg fonthier.dot -Glabel="" -Elabel="" > fonthier.dot.svg
Spacing and kerning
-
A pretty good guide to spacing letters, regardless of font software. I reproduced the spacing relationship table here:
-
Though a bit broken, it's an interesting write-up. Includes Walter Tracy's method of determining letter spacing:
-
By Leslie Cabarga. It's a weird text file. But it is specifically designed to troubleshoot kerning issues that might pop up in real world use.
-
By Impallari Type.
-
Where those two text files above came from.
-
Stephen Nixon's Spacing resource page
Heaps more complete than this one, really.
And of course there's also Puz's type design crash course, which plunged me further down this artsy rabbit hole.