FWIW, a few things I have learned so far:
This is a really useful read (you can buy the pdf from lulu for $9) - Practical Font Design for Fontlab It doesn't matter if you don't use fontlab (I don't), the general principles and reading the description of the author's workflow are very useful and will save you a lot of time and heartache. I really wish I'd read this first before jumping in!
If you want to create a good 'clean' font, don't use scanahand (or if you do, be prepared to do a fair bit of cleaning up in the font editor afterwards). Scanahand is quick, but it autotraces, which means that you don't get out quite what you put in, particularly since the boxes to put your glyphs in are so small it also creates a lot of nodes. Instead, make your font in Inkscape, and get a font editor which will import vector. I'm using the pro version of Font Creator (same people as Scanahand) but I think the home version allows you to as well. There are some free font design progs out there but I don't know how many of them will import vector objects.
If you are going to hand draw a font and work from a scan then if you are using an italic nib pen, scan a line of the italic nib in horizontal, vertical and diagonal strokes. You can use those to calibrate line width once you start using the pen tool. Draw a couple of characters on a sheet of paper at at size comfortable to your hand and scan them in. Use those characters at their native physical size to make your grid. This allows you to print out the grid as a guide to draw your remaining glyphs. You can also print out very faint outlines of glyphs you've already done to help with ones you have yet to draw to ensure consistency. If you are using an autotrace function to convert your scan to a vector object, make sure you draw the glyphs as large as you possibly can.
Make your glyphs in a vector program by chopping off and reusing bits of previous glyphs you've made to ensure consistency.
Your first character is really important (lowercase h seems to be the norm), as it will determine the line widths, x-height (ascender/descender depending) and slope (if any) of the entire font. It's worth spending a lot of time with the pen tool getting it absolutely right.
After you've drawn your first two characters (which should have an ascender, a descender and something which fits to the x-height - eg. a g and h make your grid in your vector program with all your metric heights.
The tiniest errors stand out a mile. Each font has to be perfect. Consistent line width is critical. Quite often things that are mathematically consistent may not look visually consistent.
Practice, practice, practice with the pen tool. Try to make the glyph with as few nodes as possible. Make sure that the node arms don't over extend or cross each other. If they do, then put in more nodes.
Test your font on the fly in microsoft word. It's great because you don't have to shut it down and reopen it every time you make adjustments to your font and reinstall it.
Here's where I'm at with my latest effort, which is taking ages but the results are beginning to come through now. I'm drawing each glyph with the pen tool from scratch rather than amending an existing font (which would have been miles quicker), but it's good practice with the pen tool.
Cheers and best of luck!!
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