I'm not sure where else to ask this, since there's no Illustrator forum, but perhaps someone here knows how to do this... I would like to find an easy way to edit a TrueType font. Specifically, I have a font I would like to turn into a stencil style font. I can fake this by placing little lines over the characters in Illustrator, but the more I thought about the uses for this font (eg, text along circular paths, etc), the more I decided I need to edit the characters themselves.

Edit the font itself? There's no way to do this in Illustrator or Photoshop. If you want to edit the font characters themselves (so that when you type, it's in a whole other font that you can use for other projects), then you need a font creation/editing program -- something like Fontographer, I imagine. But if you mean edit them as paths for a one-time project in Illustrator, convert the type to outlines. To do that, make sure the text is selected, then go to Type > Create Outlines. That features makes the text into letter-shaped vector art that you can do with as you will -- edit the paths, intersect them with other shapes and paths, or whatever. Hope that helps.