I haven’t found the program I’ve been searching for but I did find a disk with my favorite Atari font editor and the Diamond Font Editor. This was a mystery. I never found Diamond’s font editor to be very useful but there it was among the *.FNT, *.DFT and FONT.BAS.

A *.FNT file is likely to be files containing the data for the Atari 8X8 screen font. The FONT.BAS turned out to be the Create-A-Font editor by Vince Erceg. It was copyrighted 8/2/83 and first appeared in Analog #16, February 1984. Well worth the look if you need to do any character set editing.

*.DFT are Diamond Fonts. Diamond Fonts are not restricted to 8X8 characters so the first bits of the font file define the width and height of the character.

FONTEDIT.APP is the Diamond Font Edit from Reeve Software, c 1989. It can be used to import *.FNT and save them to *.DFT for use in Diamond Write.

When first opening the font editor the letter “A” is in the editor matrix. I was never able to move to a different letter, no matter what keys I pressed. It has taken almost 25 years for me to find the keys to move to the next or previous character. You would think someone would have mentioned that “<” and “>” will change the character to edit. (Dhaaa….) If I’d have known this sooner I would have added a couple of more starts to its rating.

The editor seems to be limited to 8X8 bit fonts. The dropdown menu item File –> New Font and Option –> Font Name or Edit Char do not have any functionality. There is no way to define a different font size. If you know differently please don’t wait 25 more years to let me know.