At first glance, Alphabix may seem like an inferior font editor, but you must take certain qualities into account when considering the software. It really is more of a font creator than an editor, in that it allows you to make your own font rather than make major edits to an existing font. Your font can be based on handwritten glyphs or glyphs that are designed in an illustrator application like Microsoft Paint or Adobe Illustrator.

To that end, Alphabix is actually a very simple and easy to use font creator that happens to have a select few editing functions as well. To get started, you just select “new” from the File dropdown menu, then choose which glyphs you’d like to work with from the list of 223 options. Unfortunately, these are the only glyphs that you can work with, but they include all the basic punctuation symbols and a few advanced symbols, letters (even some accented letters) and numbers. Clicking the “character set” dropdown menu lets you chose from one of 13 sets of specialized glyphs. These sets include specialized glyphs like those found in Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, Cyrillic, Baltic and other languages, but they all include the standard English A-Z as well. The symbol set includes nothing but wingdings, and available glyphs even include some common fractions – a feature that many other font creators don’t offer.

If you want to work with an existing font, you can import vector or bitmap images, as well as bitmap fonts saved as BF files (though these are often harder to find when downloading fonts online). You can also use Type 1, OpenType and TrueType fonts. When working with existing fonts, you will select the glyphs you wish to work with, as described above.

After you select your glyphs, they will appear in your main window. You can change the colors of the font, though that is the only real change you can make to the font design itself. Adjustments of things like kerning, metrics and hinting are not possible. The software also lacks drawing tools to make minor tweaks to individual glyphs. You can make edits to a font’s family and style name, though this is only advisable if you are saving a copy of an original font or creating a new one from scratch.

If you want to change a glyph entirely, you can use the “replace a character by a picture” function. This allows you to replace characters – either individually or as a set – with glyphs that you have drawn. When we tried to replace the capital A with our drawn A, the software recognized that we had the subsequent B-Z letters created, and asked us if we’d like to import those as well. That made creating a new font from our scanned images incredibly easy.

Alphabix will convert OpenType, TrueType and Type 1 fonts into bitmap fonts. You can also save your fonts as PNG files or as an HTML file for web fonts.

Help and support is, unfortunately, pretty basic. You can access the help document – an HTML that is accessible without internet – for tips. It is brief, but such a simple application hardly needs an advanced manual. The phone number provided on the website is international, so that may be inaccessible to some U.S. users; however, there is an email address provided as well.