Good morning everyone
I have been building fonts for the since 2013 and I am ready to step my game up to a professional soft like Fontlab or Font Creator. I have been using FontForge to finalize fonts designed in other vector environments, and need something that can assist me with the following pain points:

- comprehensive and easy-to-use auto kern features
- simplistic method of copying all characters to Extended Latin, even if I have to program a macro

What is your experience, and what are your recommendations? Alternatively, if you have built kerning class tables that cover latin characters (Will map A kerning to all latin A's, etc), I am willing to buy a blank font from you to use as a template.

Since I build the vectors and map them to letters in other environments, entry level products like Fontlab TypeTool may also work - your input is appreciated.

Dan,

Here is my modest experience:

- for auto-kern features, FontCreator seems to be better than FontLab, but keep in mind it will never replace manual kerning. It is just a quick trick, but nothing more.

- In FontLab, you need to create the accent you would like to use, as well as the base letter. For example, if you created the acute and the letter "E", if you click on the É glyph, it will be created automatically. Keep in mind you mind need to readjust the position of both elements from time to time. I don't know how FontCreator works with this kind of things.

FontForge:

Edit /Copy reference
and Paste it Into,...

Can confirm. This makes me want to kill myself.

I work with Font Creator so here my two cents.
On autokern: Font Creator has that function and it works very well provided that you have done somethings well before you use it. Important is that you first set your horizontal advance widths as accurate as possible. The left and right bearings are not the same for every character specially for sans serifs. If you would choose for 60 em for an H or I go for 40 for an O shape and 20 for an A and so. Then, apart from LT and so combinations, you have a reasonable starting point for AutoKerning. Instead of setting the bearings by hand you get a quicker and slightly better result using the Optical Metrics function.
Then, using AutoKern select the kerning pairs you want and experiment with the white space between characters and the minimum absolute kerning value. Quickest way, select all glyphs. With some trying you will find values that are reasonably close to your advance widths settings and get fewer and fewer kerning pairs, not much more than needed. Play the game a few times and it becomes a routine. Be aware, you will always need to check afterwards an do some corrections manually but when you have prepared well it should be minimal. If you end up with many repeating corrections export the kerning text file and use the find/replace function of a text editor. Will save you quite some time.

On the Extended Latin characters, Font Creator comes with several scripts to add these characters like the WGL4.0 Character Set. This script inserts the complete WGL4 character set, or Windows Glyph List 4 as defined by Microsoft to cover European Code Pages1250 (Eastern Europe), 1251 (Cyrillic), 1252 (ANSI), 1253 (Greek) and 1254 (Turkish). Then just use the complete composites script.
To get the accents correctly positioned above or under the character that needs that accent just position that accent-glyph on the correct vertical position for a lower case letter. They will automatically be correctly for capital letters. To prevent intersecting coordinates with some composites like AE ae OE oe and C-cedilla the components will have to be merged manually.

It is all very well explained in the manual and you have a trial period of 30 days. If you are serious about it plenty of time to experiment, I think. The one thing you can not do with the trial version is export te work file to an actual font. But you can try every function and will notice that the learning curve is not very steep, contrary to FontLab and FontForge.

Again, NO, I do not have a financial interest in High Logic.

This sounds awesome.

I generally don't worry about accents but it bums me out when the .notdef character shows up. Font Creator's Standard Edition is on sale for $150 right now: just hitting up their forums about the WGL4 script in this edition.

In the end you will end up with the pro version I think. So also check the upgrade possibilities.

I'm not certain about that.

The more I learn, the more it looks like importing a standardized GSUB table is a better way to store a map to the extended latin characters without actually defining the glyphs. If I can find an open source GSUB table, I may be able to go with a purchase just for the kerning.