How the app works

What you see happening

1. You either upload a file from the studio or start a blank drawing set.
2. For scans and photos, Tracey finds the page, checks the corner marks, and straightens the grid.
3. It removes page lines and labels, then reads your handwriting shape in each box.
4. For blank drawing sets, the app starts with empty glyph slots and you draw into the same repair canvas used for scan cleanup.
5. Each glyph is cleaned into a scalable vector shape that appears in the live preview.
6. The app flags things to review and gives you per-glyph controls for scale, baseline, spacing, skew, and weight.
7. Small mask repairs are retraced into the glyph itself, not kept as a visual overlay.
8. You review, then export `.otf` for normal use or `.ufoz` for font-editor handoff.

What the warnings mean

• Dark or blurry image: the app may warn and ask for a clearer photo.
• Corners missing: the app cannot align the template confidently.
• Many clipped letters: text is touching cell edges and may need a re-take.
• Very unbalanced quality: export may be blocked so you can fix it first.

Current production scope

This version is stable for clean, high-contrast sheets. Signed-in users can save multiple projects, reopen them from the account area, and unlock paid exports when the font is above the free complexity limit. Supplementary pages open a merge review before changing the current font. It does not yet include collaboration, automatic style repair, or finished OpenType variant features.

What Tracey keeps for review

• The source cell crop from the upload that produced each glyph.
• The original clean mask from import, kept separately from the current repaired mask.
• The current cleaned mask used for tracing, including any applied manual repairs.
• The traced vector outline used in preview and export.
• The font-wide metrics used to place glyphs on the baseline.
• For signed-in projects, structured document, source upload, source square, and glyph rows with protected asset references.