Use of Fontself in Illustrator. If you have ever thought about creating a typeface, you have always required an external third party application to use such as FontLab but this tool does it all.
You must have Illustrator and you must install it and that is done via their installer. You will find it in the window / extensions menu (probably along with other extensions) and to use, simply select that. Of course you need some designs to add into the tool (this can be done before or after you display it).Click the 'new' to create a new OTF (or open etc if you wish to open an existing one)
For a trial version, it is easiest to use a preexisting typeface to create the characters. Just use a previously installed one and expand the A B C D etc and 1 2 3 4 etc and drag those into the extension. If you are creating commercial typefaces then clearly you can't do that and release it. Creating a test OTF with existing designs is fine if it is purely for a test and checking out how to use the extension.
To use it, you must create 26 characters for the uppercase and 26 characters for the lowercase and 10 characters for the numerical fields. OK, so you have the first batch of 26 characters and they must be 26 characters, not 27 or 30 etc so you must use the pathfinder to combine paths if you have a couple of paths for a single character. Select all 26 characters.
Drag the artwork to the extension and select the A-Z or a-z field when requested (depending on the characters and whether they are for uppercase or lowercase). Do the same with the lowercase / uppercase 26 characters and drag and then fill that set (when highlighted).It will take some time to process but you will see all the glyphs filled for A-Z etc.
Now select the 10 characters from 0 - 9 and drag and select the numbers option.
Modify the letter spacing for the entire typeface as well as line spacing by clicking the + -.
Drag other characters to fill the other glyphs such as commas etc by clicking the batch. With the batch glyphs, you will have to go and update those manually by simply going to the glyph and entering a ] or _ etc into the little box below the character. You don't have to do this but you might like to have your set to include commas and full stops and exclamation marks etc.
You will still need some info. Sadly, the tool never stores the information for the info, which is unusual as the license information etc is probably the same from OTF to OTF. Anyway, put as much as you want about the family name etc
If you want to create an independent OTF file for use to sell etc or just for backup purposes then click the export command and you will then create an OTF file that can be used by others on the PC and mac.
Use this option if you just want the tool to install a font for use in the creative cloud and on your machine. You can, of course, manually take the OTF and install it via the control panel etc on your PC. The videos below are for TTF but exactly the same for OTF files.
MAC : Youtube video on subject