How to make a custom font

We have a dozen or so symbols we use over and over again in our publication.
They come from three different PostScript fonts, and each has its own character
formatting applied (size, baseline shift, etc.).

Presently, we're using character styles to style each symbol individually.
However, I was told there is a way to take each symbol, with the formatting we
need applied, and make a single new font that contains them all. After some
looking around, I'm unsure of what I need...any advice out there?

Thanks,

What you need:

(1) A font editing program such as FontLab.

(2) Quite a bit of knowledge of how fonts work and are put together, much of
which is more oral tradition than anything else.

(3) Explicit permission of the copyright holder for each of the fonts you wish
to "borrow" from to use their glyph definition(s) in a custom font
that you are putting together.

(4) As an alternative to (3), become a good enough artist such that you can
combine (1) and (2) above with your own versions of the symbol designs to
develop your own font entirely.

As an alternative to all of this, there are companies that specialize in doing
exactly what you need. I would advise exploring that route first!

Lisa
If you are using InDesign, you might explore using snippets and/or the library
palette to put those glyphs in for easy access.

Stan Wetherald
Quality Quickprint

Dov,

Thanks...most of the symbols are pretty simple, so I may be able to do #4 (I'm
pretty good with Illustrator). Thanks so much for your response!

Stan,