Maurí­cio wrote:
> I've been doing some searching on how to create my own fonts. If
> possible, I would like to be able to write my own program to
> at least draw glyphs, even if I have to resort to other tools
> to describe hinting, kerning and ligatures.
>
> My current knowledge is this. I read that OpenType fonts are
> actually Type 1 fonts embedded in an archive.

Not exactly, and there is a much simpler way to create fonts,
by using the open source font editor fontforge to do the hard work.

 http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/

There are two options: you can use the python scripting support of
fontforge to generate fonts directly (all font types !) or you can
create an SFD file (fontforge's internal storage format, which is just
plain ASCII) and use fontforge itself for the final tuning.