Building a Font Collection

Windows XP comes with a set of trustworthy TrueType fonts that will meet your needs for many occasions. Most folks get by just fine with Times New Roman, Courier New, and Arial, with maybe an occasional character from Symbol or WingDings. What else could you need? Why should you purchase or download freeware or shareware fonts? And how do you install them and choose which fonts to use in your documents? Let's look at these topics in order.

The prime reason to expand your collection of fonts is simply to make your documents look spiffier, express your message with more alacrity, or convey a specific mood such as formal, festive, or casual.

After you've settled on the font format you're going to use, your next task is to decide how to acquire the fonts. Will you pay for them or download freebies over the Net? The number of typeface designs available for Windows totals in the thousands and is still growing. With that much variety, selecting a set of fonts that's right for you can be a daunting proposition.

Classes of Fonts

Having a basic understanding of font classifications is a good idea before you start purchasing fonts and designing your own documents.

The two primary categories of fonts are serif and sans-serif designs. Serifs are the little embellishments that extend from the main strokes of the character. Serifs often are added to improve readability. As the name implies, sans-serif fonts lack these embellishments, making for a cleaner look. Sans-serif fonts tend to work well for headlines (most newspapers use them), whereas serif fonts are traditionally used for body text (this book is a good example). Combining one serif and one sans-serif font in this way will look good together, but two sans-serif or two serif fonts will clash.

The next major classification of fonts has to do with the spacing between characters. In monospaced fonts, every character occupies the same amount of horizontal line space. For example, l and W get the same amount of linear space. In the following sentence you can see an example of a monospaced font:

 This text is set in a monospaced font called MacmillanUSAdigital. 

By contrast, proportionally spaced fonts give differing amounts of line space, depending on the character. A W gets more space than an l or an i. The body text in this book uses proportionally spaced fonts, making it easier to read. The advantage of using monospaced fonts is that they allow you to easily align columns of text or numbers when you're using a simple word processor such as Notepad or sending email. You can use the spacebar to align the items in the columns, as you would on a typewriter.

TIP

For easier alignment, numerals in most proportionally spaced fonts are monospaced. But in proportionally spaced fonts, you still have the problem with the spacebar. A press of the spacebar in a monospaced font advances the cursor one full block, just as any character does. In a proportional font, the spacebar moves the cursor only a small increment. So, it's still difficult to align rows of characters using the spacebar. If your word processing program has tab stops, setting them and then using the Tab key can help overcome this problem. Using tabs can be problematic when you're reading a document in a program other than the one it was created in, because not all programs translate tabs identically. Aligning columns in email, for example, is a dicey proposition at best because email programs use different fonts and often give users the option of choosing the display font on their own. It might or might not be a monospaced font. Using HTML-based (rich-text) email is one solution to this problem, though not all email client programs can handle it properly. See Chapter 10, "Sending Email with Outlook Express," for more details about HTML mail.

If you can't get columns of text or numbers to align in a document someone has sent you, see "Text Columns Out of Alignment" in the "Troubleshooting" section at the end of this chapter.

Two other categories of fonts (after headline and body text) are ornamental and nonalphabetic symbols. Ornamental (sometimes called display) fonts have limited application. They are often fun in the short term, or for a one-shot deal such as a poster or a gag. They often attract attention but are too highly stylized to be suitable for body text, and they can distract the readers' attention from your message. Windows doesn't come stocked with any decorative fonts. One that was popular a few years ago (and overused!) was Zapf Chancery. You should use ornamental fonts sparingly and only when you want to set a special mood.

Symbol or pi fonts contain special symbols such as musical notes, map symbols, or decorations instead of letters, numbers, and punctuation marks. Good examples are Symbol, Zapf Dingbats, and WingDings.

To learn more about symbol and other non-keyboard characters, p. 175.

Procuring Fonts

Due to increased interest in typography generated by desktop publishing technology and now with the Web, the number of font designers and vendors has exploded. Fonts are included as part of cheesy applications packages, as well as in the better word processing programs. And the Web is riddled with sites pushing everything from high-class fonts from respected foundries down to $2 fonts.

Many leading font vendors, including Bitstream, Monotype, SoftKey, and others, are producing TrueType font collections. Although you can find these collections in most software stores, Web downloads are easier. Quite charitably, Microsoft has a site that lists all the type foundries known to it, with descriptions and links. Check out this very helpful site:

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/links/links.asp?type=foundries&part=1

If that link dies for some reason, check back at the primary Microsoft fonts site and click around the following:

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/default.mspx

Other sites you might find of interest are as follows:

• Agfa/Monotype's site:

  http://www.monotype.com/

• Bitstream:

  http://www.bitstream.com

• Adobe Systems:

  www.adobe.com

• And for some cheapie (and free) fonts, check the following:

  www.buyfonts.com

  http://www.fontcraft.com/scriptorium/index.html

I've also seen numerous cheapie CD-ROMs in several computer stores that pack hundreds of TrueType fonts on them.

NOTE

Although shareware and freeware TrueType fonts are plentiful, be aware that not all TrueType fonts have sophisticated hinting built in. Therefore, they might not look as good as fonts from the more respectable font foundries. Some reports from users indicate that funky font files can make your system freak out a bit. In general, though, even the free TrueType (OpenType) fonts will look very good, and you'll be hard pressed to notice the difference.