Chapter 16: Font Feathered Frenzy

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Overview

Adding New Fonts to Your System

There are basically two kinds of fonts: bitmap and outline. The difference between these two is essentially the same as that between bitmap and vector graphics, which I discussed in Chapter 14.

Bitmap characters are stored as a map of dots — the bitmap. The main limitation of bitmaps is that they only look good at the size and resolution they were designed for. Just like bitmap images, the more you enlarge a bitmap character, the worse it looks. This is particulary noticeable in rounded characters, such as O and P, where “the jaggies” becomes an issue.

Outline fonts, on the other hand, are similar in concept and design to vector graphics. Each character is stored as a mathematical formula, and just like vector graphics, outline characters keep their clean shape no matter how much you enlarge them. The main outline font formats are Type 1, or PostScript, which was developed by Adobe, and TrueType, which was developed by Apple. As free TrueType fonts are so easy to deal with, so readily available on the Net, and so easily handled in Fedora Core, I will focus on TrueType fonts in this chapter.

Your Fedora system comes with a wide variety of very usable and, at least to my eyes, rather handsome TrueType fonts. However, these tend to be a bit on the conservative side of the aesthetic spectrum, and many users tend to want to add a few somewhat more distinctive, usually wilder, fonts to the system repertoire. In my own case, I had this really cool idea of writing messages to my friend in old Scandinavian runes. Of course, my friend wet-blanketed the whole idea, so it all came to naught.

You probably won’t be interested in sending cryptic runic messages to your friends, but you may want to print out an award for some event using some sort of Gothic font, or you might be preparing a newsletter for your local chapter of the snail breeders’ society and want to use a font that is round, bubbly, and slimy. Whatever your penchant, purpose, or desire, you will probably come to the point when you want to install some other TrueType fonts on your system.

Before you install anything, of course, you have to find some fonts. The Internet is a good source, of course, and there are many sites that have a variety of freeware, shareware, and for-sale TrueType fonts available for download. When choosing and downloading fonts, it is best to select those designed for Windows rather than those for Mac. Fonts designed for the Windows world will most likely be in the form of ZIP files, and this will pose no problem for you, because once they are on your machine you can extract them with File Roller. Simply double-click them, just as you have with the other tarballs you have used thus far, and go through the File Roller steps you learned in Chapter 9. Once you’ve done this, the font file will appear as an icon showing an upper- and lowercase sample of the first letter in that font (see Figure 16-1).

Figure 16-1: Font icons display the first letter in the font

In addition to getting a glimpse of what the fonts look like through these icons, you can also see all, or at least almost all, of the characters in a given font by double-clicking the font icon. A window, as shown in Figure 16-2, will open, showing you most of the characters in A-to-Z format and then in the traditional “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog” format that you may well remember from your junior or senior high school typing classes.

Figure 16-2: Previewing a font by double-clicking the font icon

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