typography - Building hand-written fonts for lettering

I am looking to build a custom font from my handwriting for lettering a comic.

what professional tools exist to build such a font and export it into one of the mainstream formats (TTF, OpenType, or Type1)?

I am not a typography expert, but I imagine there are two approaches to this - a vector-based and a bitmap-based one. While I'm open for both ways, vectorizing the handwriting would surely be a very attractive option.

WYSIWYG kerning/pairing functions (with previews for each pair) would be much appreciated.

I can use Windows or Linux. Open Source is preferable, but I'd be prepared to cough up for a commercial solution too.

Tutorials on the process are most welcome as well, as I have never done this before.

Answer

I can assure you that FontForge can do everything that FontLab can, with the exception of two things (that come to mind right now): fancy visual Truetype hinting tools, and support of the UFO format that's widely used by script collections like RoboFab, Superpolator etc. That said, FontForge has a fine and useful Python API itself, which could be used for the same purpose. FontForge does, however, have a much more intuitive interface for writing OT Features and editing things like gasp tables.

FontForge's GUI is, well, special, because George Williams happens to have a dislike for both GTK and Qt. At first it may seem a bit unintuitive, but once you have the keyboard shortcuts down working with FontForge actually becomes very fast.

Also make sure you get the lastest version from SVN and compile it yourself. The binary releases were outdated and buggy (at least last time I checked).