Getting Started

This guide is the practical first pass. It assumes you want to create or open a font, edit some glyphs, then save and export without learning every detail of the workspace first.

1. Create Or Open A Font

Use File › New for a fresh font, or File › Open for an existing font source such as `.bdf`, `.dfont`, `.fon`, `.fnt`, `.otf`, `.ttf`, `.zip` BMFont bundles, or embedded screen fonts as `.c` or `.h`.

If a source file contains more than one importable font or embedded size, the app asks which imported assets you want to open.

2. Understand The Starting Windows

Each open font gets a Characters window and can have one or more editor or preview windows. The characters window is for browsing and selecting glyphs. The editor window is for specimen editing and glyph editing.

The workspace is floating-window based, so you can move, resize, and reopen windows as needed. Layout is autosaved locally.

3. Edit In The Specimen First

  1. Open one or more glyphs into an editor window.
  2. Type specimen text directly into the editor.
  3. Double-click a character in the specimen strip or Characters window to edit that glyph.
  4. Draw on the bitmap grid with the active tool from the left rail.

This is the intended workflow. The live specimen helps you see spacing, tracking, kerning, and repeated characters in context before you commit to detailed pixel edits.

4. Use Font Info Early

File to Font Info lets you set the font name, width mode, case mode, dimensions, and shared metrics such as baseline, cap height, x-height, and descender. It is better to set these deliberately before you spend too long drawing, because dimension changes can crop existing pixels.

Fixed-width and variable-width are both supported. In variable-width fonts, the active glyph can carry its own width without changing the rest of the font.

5. Save A Real Source File

Autosave protects the local workspace on the current device, but the actual editable source format is `.alphabit.json`. Use Save when you want a portable file you can reopen later or keep in version control.

Imported files become normal Alphabit Studio documents once opened. Saving does not write back into the original source format.

6. Export A Deliverable

Use File to Export when you need output for another runtime or tool. Supported targets include embedded C formats, BDF, Adafruit `GFXfont`, Playdate `.fnt`, BMFont ZIP bundles, UFOZ, and orthogonal outline OTF.

Some exports are lossier than others. For example, fixed-width exporters can still be used from a variable-width font, but they normalize glyphs back to one shared width.

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