Practicing the Black Art (07/01)
Know your fonts
by Vinny La Bash, vlabash@home.com
Member of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc.
Fonts make your documents distinctive and stylish. They can be boring or exciting, depending on how you use them. Times New Roman is a good general purpose typeface suitable for correspondence and other commonplace applications. Unless you tell your word processor otherwise, the chances are good that you are composing and printing your documents with this font. Times New Roman is your PC's dull default font and like any workhorse will get the job done. Your old `67 Chevrolet may take you where you want to go, but it's a lot classier to ride to your destination in a late model Ferrari.
Fonts can change the appearance of a document in dramatic, unexpected ways. Some fonts seem to have personalities all their own as they either enhance or wreck your efforts. Before you start manipulating fonts, it may be a good idea to cover some basics. A commonplace practice is to use the terms fonts and typefaces interchangeably though this isn't really accurate. Typefaces describe how characters are shaped. A font is a design for a set of characters that includes typefaces, vertical size measured in points, horizontal size measured in pitch, and the amount of space between characters. When the design includes attributes such as bold and italics, you have a font family. Arial Narrow, Arial Italic, Arial Bold, and Arial Narrow Italic are all typefaces within the Arial font family.
Now that you know a few font basics, it's time to take a look at the Fonts Folder and see how it works.
Bring up the Start menu, move your mouse pointer to Settings, and select Control Panel. From there, open the Fonts Folder shortcut icon. The fonts you see in the Fonts Folder are available for any installed Windows application on your system. Unless you have changed the View options, you will find yourself looking at the standard Large Icons view. You see the icon representing the typeface and the name of the typeface. Most of the icons have a TT across the face, indicating they are True Type fonts. True Type fonts are scalable, meaning you can enlarge them or reduce them in size with no distortion of the characters. A few icons have an A on their faces, indicating they are bitmap fonts. You can't enlarge or reduce the size of these typefaces. You can try, but you won't like the results. Don't get any ideas about deleting these fonts. Some of them may be system or native fonts, which your PC uses for things like system messages and dialog boxes. Remove them at your peril.
Normal folders usually have four View options for icons: Large icons, Small icons, List, and Details. In the Fonts Folder, the Small icons view is replaced by the List Fonts By Similarity option. This option, which first made its appearance in Windows '98, lets you select a font and then lists fonts with similar typefaces. Why would you want to do that? Let's say you are composing a report where you want to change the typeface to offset headings from the body of text and image captions. Select the most desirable font for the main text and the Fonts Folder will list fonts that are similar to the main font, but not so strikingly different as to upset the visual sensibilities of the reader.
Scroll to the bottom of the list and you will probably see some fonts with "No PANOSE information available" next to them. PANOSE is a classification system for typefaces that categorizes them based upon their visual characteristics. If this information is not embedded within the font, your system can't calculate its degree of similarity to the selected font. There's nothing you can do about it, so ignore it.
At the bottom left hand corner of the Fonts Folder is a number which shows how many fonts are installed on your system. You can store any number of fonts, but for various technical reasons the actual number of fonts that you can use is limited to around 1,000. (If you need more than 1,000 fonts, please drop me an email and tell me why. I'd love to hear from you).
To reduce the clutter, select the remaining option in the View menu, Hide Variations (Bold, Italic, etc.). Fonts such as Arial can have more than a dozen variations, and this option will display only the main font file.
You've made it this far. Would you like to see what the font actually looks like? Open any font icon with your mouse and if you like, maximize the font sample box that appears. (Figure 1) Here you can see the standard character set, which reflects what's on your keyboard. In addition there is information about the font, file size, version, and copyright information. Seeing "The quick brown fox..." in seven different point sizes isn't the most thrilling experience, but it shows what to expect in your documents.
Scroll down the Fonts Folder window until you find Times New Roman. Open the icon and then bring up Character Map from the System Tools menu. If Times New Roman isn't selected, get it from the drop down list box. What you will see is seven rows of characters. (Figure 2) The first three rows comprise the Standard Character Set and as noted earlier, represents the characters on a standard keyboard. The bottom four rows represent the Extended Character Set, which allow you to insert foreign language marks and special symbols within your documents. Select and copy the character you want in Character Map and then paste it into your document. It's a little cumbersome sometimes, but it beats having to buy a special keyboard just to access a few special characters or symbols you may need from time to time.
Don't be afraid to delete non system fonts from the Fonts Folder. If you're not using it, it's taking up space and you can always reinstall it later if you wish. The easiest thing to do is move the font to an external device such as a Zip drive, and copy it back to the Fonts Folder if you ever want it back again.
Installing new fonts is almost as easy. From the File menu in the Fonts Folder, select Install New Font. When the Install New Font dialog box appears, (Figure 3), navigate to the drive and folder where your new font resides, select the font, and click OK.
Where do you get fonts? Windows installs its own fonts and so do most applications like your word processor. You use this method when you buy fonts from a third party or after you download a font from a Website.
This article is hardly the last word on font management, but it does provide you with a starting point for exploring possibilities. :
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Copyright 2001. This article is from the July 2001 issue of the Sarasota PC Monitor, the official monthly publication of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc., P.O. Box 15889, Sarasota, FL 34277-1889. Permission to reprint is granted only to other non-profit computer user groups, provided proper credit is given to the author and our publication. We would appreciate receiving a copy of the publication the reprint appears in, please send to above address, Attn: Editor. For further information about our group, email: admin@spcug.org/ Web: http://www.spcug.org/
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