OTF font tools

I spent a lot of time yesterday trying to figure out the best way to
make an opentype font from the truetype fonts. I evaluated two free
tools, pfaedit and ttx/fonttools. 

Pfaedit is a graphical tool, one can draw the splines, put encodings,
give names to glyphs etc. It is fairly advanced tool. I still haven't 
figured out all kinds of interesting things that can be done with it.

I tried opening a new font (pfaedit -new) and tried to cut and paste
the glyphs from rachana fonts into the new one. But pfaedit crashes
when I do so. I will try to get the cvs sources and try with it.
Probably it is a bug in the versio nI have (from debian unstable).

On the other hand TTX/fonttools serves different role. One can dump
a ttf/otf font into an xml-like text file, which can be edited using
any editor. All the tables contained in the font (like for example
the gdef/gpos/gsub tables of OTF) are dumped into a .ttx file. (try
ttx fontname.{ttf,otf} and it dumps all information into fontname.ttx)
The glyph names remain unchanged, so one can work with glyph names
rather than the hex codes or glyph-ids.

I am planning to use both for making the rachana OTF. Please try the
tools out and let the list know any ideas.

Thanks
-- 
    Ramakrishnan
    Use Free Software -- Help stamp out Software Hoarding!