What Is the Main Window in FontForge?

When you first launch FontForge and create or open a font file, the primary interface that appears is called the Font View. This article provides a concise overview of what the Font View is, how it serves as the central hub of the application, and the essential functions you can access from this default workspace.

The main window in FontForge is officially named the Font View. It presents a comprehensive, spreadsheet-style grid containing all the glyph slots available in the current font encoding. Each cell in the grid corresponds to a specific character or glyph, displaying its visual shape, encoding index, and Unicode name.

The Font View acts as the primary navigational dashboard for your entire font project. From this window, you can:

• Open Individual Glyphs: Double-clicking any character cell opens the Outline Glyph View (also known as the Char View), which is the vector drawing window used to design, edit, and manipulate individual letterforms.
• Manage Encodings: View and reorder character sets according to different standards such as Unicode, ISO-8859, or custom encodings using the Encoding menu.
• Select and Transform Batches: Highlight multiple glyphs simultaneously to apply global modifications, such as scaling, shifting, transforming, or generating auto-metrics.
• Access Font Information: Open the global font metadata and settings dialog by navigating to the Element menu to configure font families, weights, copyright data, and OS/2 metrics.
• Launch Secondary Tools: Open other specialized workspaces, such as the Metrics View for adjusting letter spacing and kerning, or generate final font files (such as OTF and TTF) directly through the File menu.

Without the Font View active, you cannot manage font-wide properties or navigate between different character slots, making it the foundational interface of the FontForge workflow.