As font makers go, Type 3.2 is not hard to use. The tools in your Type Toolbox will seem familiar if you've ever used a painting or design program. You get a pointer for selecting nodes, a knife, a freehand pencil, and simple shape tools for drawing rectangles and ellipses. Using these tools to create a glyph design from scratch is more difficult than using a graphic design program (such as the $89 ) and tracing the glyph; but with perseverance, Type gets the job done. The curve tools, for example, are confusing at first: Type includes tools for creating a Corner Curve, a Smooth Curve, a Straight Corner, and off-curve nodes, as well as a pen for adding straight lines and a fully freehand tool.

Much like (which costs $100 for the Home Edition and $250 for the professional version, which permits commercial use), Type lets you trace a glyph that you've created in a drawing program. Type does this extremely well if you have a clean, well-sized vector sample. I also like that Type includes a slider for increasing or decreasing the number of nodes (nodes are the points that make up the curves of your glyph; generally, the fewer nodes you have, the smoother your glyph will look). The node slider is a useful feature that FontCreator doesn't offer. Be aware, however, that the demo version of Type places an X over traced images, rendering them useless.

Though Type is relatively easy to get started with, you'll have to overcome some difficulties to create a full font. For one thing, using Type to create glyphs that incorporate bits of other glyphs (as most fonts do with the beginnings of the characters for m and n, for example) is not intuitive. And learning how to use Type to fill certain areas of a font and leave other areas transparent (to create a defined look with a 3D font, for instance) takes some time and research. The video tutorials and help menu for Type are informative and--for the most part--easy to follow for basic concepts; but as you advance as a user, you'll find yourself having to rely more and more frequently on trial-and-error.

The demo version of Type doesn't accurately reflect the full program's power and ease of use; in my testing on Windows Vista PC, the Type demo behaved obstinately and annoyingly, whereas the paid version of Type worked smoothly. If you're in the market for a font designer and packager, Type has two key advantages over FontCreator: It costs less, and you can use the resulting fonts commercially. If the demo version doesn't give you enough access to features, you can try downloading the free . This version of the software omits the Freehand, Glue, Knife, Touchup, Trace, and Transform tools; but even so, it gives you a better idea of how the software works than the demo version does. CR8 Software provides a showing all of the additional features available if you purchase Type 3.2.

Frustration seems to be a natural hazard in creating fonts, but Type tries to make the process easier. The online tutorials are helpful, and the program is relatively easy to use--even for someone with limited knowledge of fonts, glyphs, and characters. Nevertheless, you'll need to do your math, science, and art homework to make it work well.