A popular and somewhat intuitive font-authoring program is
FontForge. I've read through the manual out of curiousity, but never actually used it.
http://designwithfontforge.com/en-US/Introduction.htmlThe manual is interesting reading if your interested in fonts and how they're structured ...even if you don't want to create your own.
I bought a font years ago for my practice to give my drawings a traditional hand drawn feel; Prov Draftsman. It has both upper and lower-case glyphs, but few special charaters.
http://www.identifont.com/find?font=Pro ... sman+&q=GoThe lack of a degree-glyph is it's only main flaw, and I'll use the "Datacad'-font for plot-plan Bearings and angular dimensions instead at-times. Otherwise I'll just spell-out "degr.", "dia.", etc... in lower-case. One reason I prefer CapsLock over <AllCaps>.
FontSquirrel is a good source for "free for commercial use' fonts.
Dafont has personal-use and commercial fonts, some free and some for-sale.
One shortcut I've found is if a .TTF font is printing heavy --especially in a small size-- change the settings in <font> to "fill"-only for a lighter weight. Some large filled fonts conversely are better if set to "outline'-only in Datacad. YMMV.
Most fonts don't have a degree-glyph, and few or no Greek nor mathematical glyphs. There are a few fonts that were designed for mathematical and technical documentation. Several are free on the American Mathematical Society (AMS) website.