Creating an original font...

well, some of the earliest fonts were actually drafted in adobe illustrator 88, but we no longer use such programs to make fonts.

The industry standard programs now all come from a company called FontLab: http://www.fontlab.com/

Fontlab is a great tool, but it has a bit of a learning curve. They also sell a program called "Fontographer" that is oriented a bit more towards novices, but Fontographer cannot generate OpenType fonts.

The fontlab manual (all 800 pages of it) is downloadable from the Fontlab site. Leslie Carbaga sells a small book titled Learn Fontlab Fast that has some useful information if you have never created a font before.

I am not sure how much type design information is online (much of it is still learned though apprenticeships), but I know that Typophile has some resources, and an active community of type designers.

http://www.typophile.com/

Oh, and here is an old thread where, apparently, I said the same thing: http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/t-663376.html

 

This is somewhat misleading. For two decades, Fontographer was the professional font editor. In recent years, it languished through a several changes of ownership. Fontlab purchased it, ported the Mac version to MacOS X, and targeted it below its namesake font editor.

It is true that Fontographer cannot generate OpenType fonts. However, this is because the editor is pretty much a MacOS X port of a System 6 app. If, however, its editing functions for PostScript Type 1 and TrueType fonts are as professional as they ever were.