The File Menu

New
Creates a new font with (by default) ISO 8859-1 (Latin1) encoding. The default encoding may be changed in the preference dlg.
Open
Brings up a file chooser and allows you to open a font in any of the formats PfaEdit understands.

If you open a truetype font all character hinting (instructions) will be lost. If the truetype font contains bitmaps then you will be asked if you want to load some of the bitmaps as well as the outlines.

By default this dialog will display all files with extensions of pfa, pfb, sfd, ttf, otf, gsf, ttc and bdf (possibly others as PfaEdit comes to support more formats). If you would also like it to display .ps files then enter *.{pfa,pfb,ttf,otf,bdf,sfd,ps} and press the Filter button. If you only want it to display sfd files enter *.sfd and press Filter.
You may select multiple files (by holding down the shift or control keys when clicking on them), and all selected files will be opened.
PfaEdit can open macbinary resource files containing postscript and truetype fonts (it does not open bitmap fonts currently)

Recent
A submenu showing recently used sfd files.
Close
Closes the current window.

If this is a font view and the font has been changed, then it will ask whether you want to save the font. It will also close any outline character, bitmap character or metrics views associated with the font.

Open Outline
In the font view this will open outline views on all selected characters (if there are more than 15 or so it will ask whether you really meant to do that).

In the bitmap view it will open an outline view on the current character.

In the metrics view it will open an outline view on whatever character is active.

This menu item is always grey in an outline view.

Note: It is possible to have more than one window displaying the same character. Any editing that occurs in one should be reflected in all.

Open Bitmap
In the font view this will open bitmap views on all selected characters (if there are more than 15 or so it will ask whether you really meant to do that). If the font view is displaying a bitmap then it will open a bitmap view showing that pixelsize, otherwise it will pick a pixelsize.

In the outline view it will open a bitmap view on the current character. It will pick a pointsize.

In the metrics view it will open an outline view on whatever character is active, as with the font view, if it is displaying a bitmap it will use its pixelsize, otherwise it will pick a pixelsize.

This menu item is always grey in an bitmap view.

Note: It is possible to have more than one window displaying the same character. Any editing that occurs in one should be reflected in all.

Open Metrics
In the font view it will open a metrics view displaying all selected characters. The new metrics view will display whatever the font view displays (outline or bitmap).

In the outline view it will open a metrics view displaying the current character. The display will be an outline.

In the bitmap view it will open a metrics view displaying the current character. The display will be a bitmap in the current size.

This menu item is always grey in the metrics view.

It is possible to have more than one metrics view open at a time.

Save
Saves the current file. If it is associated with a spline font database it will be saved there and a backup file will be created. If it is a new font, or if the font has been read from a postscript font file, then a Save As dialog will pop up.

If you are editing a font "Ambrosia.sfd" then the backup file will be called "Ambrosia~.sfd".

Save As...
Allows you to give a new name to the current spline font database. Pops up a file picker.
Save All
Saves all changed fonts. If any have not been named, it will pop up a Save As file picker for that font.
Generate Fonts...
This generates font files, both outline and bitmap. You may choose not to generate either, you may generate an afm file or a pfm file, you may select the type of postscript output, you may select which pixelsizes of bitmap to generate.

The outline types are:

The bitmap types are:

TTF (and Open Type) fonts are usually generated in Unicode encoding, there will also be a tiny macintosh encoding of whatever bits of MacRoman fit in the first 256 glyphs (and a macintosh copy of the unicode encoding) -- the exceptions are: symbol fonts will use the symbol encoding, KSC5601 and Wansung fonts will use Wansung, Johab fonts will use johab, JIS208 and SJIS fonts will use SJIS, Big5 will use big5 encoding. Fonts with a "Full Unicode" encoding will have both a 2 byte unicode encoding table and a 4 byte table. OpenType CID keyed fonts will be saved with Unicode encoding.
Postscript fonts are generated in whatever encoding the font is using (except if you take a two byte encoding and generate a Type1 font (rather than a Type0) then only the first few characters will be encoded). Type0 does not support a full Unicode (4 byte) encoding.
PS CID (and OpenType CID in the CFF) are saved with no encoding. The encodings live in seperate cmap files which are available from adobe (and perhaps other font vendors).
If you save a CID font with a format other than PS CID or OpenType CID, then only the currenly displayed subfont will be saved, with the current meaningless character ordering (I suppose this is useful if you wish to extract a sub-font from a CID font).
TTF (and OpenType) fonts will produce vertical metrics tables if the font has vertical metrics enabled. Postscript encodings will not produce Metrics2 dictionaries (If someone actually wants this let me know, it can be done, but I get the impression that nobody uses this any more).

Revert
Rereads the font from the file on the disk. All changes are lost.
Export...
In the Outline view this allows you to export the splines that make up the character into an encapsulated postscript (.eps) file or a file in xfig format (.fig -- the conversion to fig format is not the best). You may also have the character rasterized and output in either .xbm or .bmp formats (PfaEdit will prompt you for a pixelsize. bmp also allows you to generate an anti-aliased image, and you will be prompted for bits per pixel. 1 bit per pixel is a bitmap).

In the Bitmap view this allows you to export the current character as either a .xbm or a .bmp (always as a bitmap) file.

This menu item is not available in the Font or Metrics Views.

Import...
In the Font View this allows you to import one or several bitmap fonts (from a .bdf file or a ttf/otf/ttc file, TeX pk file, or an X11 .pcf file) and merge it into the list of bitmap sizes stored in the database. You may also load one bitmap font into the backgrounds of the outline characters (So "A" from the bitmap font goes into the background of the "A" outline character), this is to make tracing characters easier. Be careful, you need to load a big bitmap for autotrace to be useful. NOTE: PfaEdit is unable to read an encoding from pk files, you will may need to set it with "Force Encoding" after you've loaded the pk file.
You may also load images into the character backgrounds. There are two ways to do this, you may either select several image files and they will be loaded consecutively into selected characters, or you may select an image template and all images whose filename match that template will be loaded into the backgrounds of the appropriate characters. Image templates look like "uni*.png" or "enc*.gif" or "cid*.tiff". You select the template by selecting a filename which matches that template-- So if you select "uni1100.gif" then all image files which start with "uni" and end with ".gif" and contain a valid unicode number will be loaded and placed in the appropriate place. Files named "enc*" or "cid*" are handled similarly except that they specify the current encoding (and the number must be in decimal rather than hex).

Finally you may load an encapsulated postscript file (or rather the sub-set of postscript that PfaEdit understands) into the foreground of characters. As with images above this may either import depending on the selection or a template.

In the Outline View this allows you to import an image into the background, or import eps or fig files into the foreground (the xfig conversion is really bad, the eps conversion is very limitted).

In the Bitmap View this allows you to import a bitmap image into the character.

This menu item is not available in the Metrics View
 
In the font view you may select multiple files (by holding down the shift or control keys when clicking on them), and all selected bitmap fonts will be imported into the sfd.

Merge Kern Info...
Only available in the font view window. This command will allow you to search for an afm (or tfm) file containing kerning pairs for the specified font. In many cases it will not be needed because when PfaEdit opens a .pfa or .pfb font it will automagically search for an appropriate .afm file in the same place. But sometimes afm files are stored in other directories. And sometimes you want to import information from TeX.
NOTE: PfaEdit is unable to read an encoding from tfm files, it is your responsibility to ensure that the encoding of your font matches that of the tfm file BEFORE merging kerning information. This is unfortunate, sorry.
Print...
Not available in the bitmap view. Allows you to print out all the characters in the font, a text sample of the font, or specific characters at a very large scale.
See the section on printing for more information.
Execute Script...
Only in the font view. Brings up a dlg and allows you to enter a script, which could be just calling a prewritten script file. There is a [Call] button in the dlg to help you locate any such files. The default extension is "*.pe" (postscript edit) but you can change that with the [Filter] button if you use something else.
Script Menu
Only in the font view. You may define up to 10 scripts that you want to execute frequently and place them in this menu. The scripts may also be invoked by short cut with the first one being invoked by Control-Meta(Alt)-1, the second Control-Meta-2, and the tenth by Control-Meta-0.
Preferences...
This pops up a dialog which allows you to specify

A number of things that might be controlled from a preference window are controlled by X Resources.

Quit
Exits the program, prompting you whether to save any changed fonts.

Other menus

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