Express Yourself with Fonts
Fonts are a powerful medium of expression. They help
you make your leaflet, brochure or business card more attractive and
personalized. In this article we will tell you what kinds of fonts exist, where
you can get them, how to install them on the computer and how to take
most of them in your documents. In particular, we will focus on using
fonts in BeLight Sofware’s Swift Publisher (easy-to-use desktop
publishing software) and Business Card Composer — the program
for designing and printing business cards. Though the article is aimed
at Macintosh users, much of it applies to Windows, too.
We include 50 carefully selected Bitstream fonts with retail editions of most of our software.
Kinds of Fonts
TrueType and PostScript
The most common types of fonts are TrueType and
PostScript Type 1.
PostScript fonts were developed by Adobe Systems. Though there is
actually no big difference between these types, Type 1 fonts have the
reputation for being better designed. If you intend to create a high-quality
design piece and are printing to a PostScript printer, you may want to
consider a PostScript font.
TrueType fonts are based on a specification developed by
Apple Computer,
and have gained a lot of popularity across both the Windows and Macintosh
operating systems.
The main differences between TrueType and Type 1 fonts are
in availability and application support. Business Card Composer and Swift
Publisher (like Cocoa applications) can equally handle both types of fonts.
 Serif and Sans Serif
Fonts can be also classified as serif / sans serif.
A serif font is one in which some (not necessarily all)
of the characters have serifs — small lines which decorate the main
strokes of a letter. Studies have shown that serif fonts are generally
easier to read than sans-serif fonts. The effect is most noticeable at
smaller font sizes, so for body text typically a serif font is used.
A sans-serif font doesn't contain any serifs. Sans-serif
fonts typically appear less formal than serif fonts, but can be used for
striking effect in headlines, chapter names, and advertisements. In addition,
sans-serif fonts are typically used when large print is called for, where
serifs become a distraction.
Families of Typefaces
 Normally
fonts come in groups of a few variants. Most fonts come with a bold,
italic and bold-italic variants. Some fonts may also have small caps,
and semi-bold variants. A group of fonts consisting of a font and its
variants is called a family of typefaces. For example, the Helvetica
family consists of Helvetica, Helvetica Oblique, Helvetica Bold,
Helvetica Bold Oblique.
Encoding
Encoding is the way character codes are mapped to the
actual characters in a font. If you’re using languages which
include characters other than Latin alphabet characters (for example,
Russian, Japanese, Greek), make sure the font you are using includes
the appropriate encoding. The Unicode encoding, using 2 bytes per
character and thus covering nearly all languages in the world, is
becoming more and more widespread.
Cocoa applications correctly handle any encodings, including Unicode.
Decorative Fonts and Dingbats
Apart from regular fonts, such as those supplied with your
operating system, there are lots of decorative fonts which are good for
using on postcards, as headers on newsletters or letterheads.
A special group of fonts is dingbats — these fonts
include various images instead of letters, and can be used as a kind of
clipart collection to illustrate documents.
Using Fonts in Documents
Here is some advice on using fonts to illustrate documents.
• Don’t use too many
different fonts in formal documents (reports, CV, overviews). It’s
recommended to use the one font throughout a style — such as
body, headings, footnotes, etc. Of course, it’s just a general
recommendation — in some documents the use of various different
fonts is justified from the artistic point of view.
• Decorative fonts are good for
letterheads. Here is a web site, offering fonts good for letterheads,
and some tips on creating them: LetterheadFonts.com
• When designing postcards,
invitations and for other informal occasions use unusual, beautiful fonts
which will make your message more personalized and attractive.
• Handwriting fonts are good for
invitations, postcards and comments to pictures and photos.
• Dingbats
The simple shapes and pictures found in dingbat fonts make them especially
useful in logo design or as icons or symbols in newsletters, books,
brochures, or other types of publications. You can rotate, stretch, and
paint them, changing their appearance completely.
 • Effects, provided by Font Book
Most of Cocoa applications use a standard system panel for managing fonts.
It contains tools which help to decorate any font — for
example, control underlining, strikeout characters (with a single, double
or color line), change the text and background color, and control various
parameters of the shadow — offset, blur, transparency and angle.
All this enables you to make an ordinary font stand out.
• The most often adjustable font
parameter is its size. There are predefined font sizes like 14, 18, 24,
36 but you can use intermediate values. Since the mentioned above font
types are vector, increasing the size doesn't affect the quality.
Installing and Managing Fonts
For whatever project you’re working on, it’s
important to be able to easily find, manage, and render all the fonts you
need. Mac OS X offers extensive font managing capabilities.
Installing Fonts
To install fonts, you may either copy them to your Fonts folder inside
your account’s Library folder, or use the Font Book utility which
is located in the Applications folder. With Font Book you can install
fonts without need to know the path to them, create sets of fonts,
disable and enable fonts as needed, and control access to fonts by
storing them in the User collection. A font disabled in Font Book will
not be listed in any application, helping to manage your font lists
and dialogs. It also allows you to preview fonts and your own text,
so that you will always know what a word, sentence, or paragraph will
look like in a particular typeface. To install a font from a CD or
another computer, either double-click the font you want to add or
drag it into Font Book.
Fonts are stored in two libraries: system and user.
If one user installed new fonts in his user library, these fonts can
be unavailable for other users.
Creating Proprietary Font Collections
When there are many fonts on your computer, it’s
a good idea to organize them in collections — either by specific
projects or clients, or by font style or encoding (for example, Cyrillic
or Japanese). It can be easily done with Font Book. To create a new
collection of fonts, click the Add button (+) at the bottom of the
Collection pane on the left of the Font Book window, and drag fonts
there either from the Fonts pane or from a folder on the hard drive.
You can easily disable and enable the entire collection or an individual
font from the Edit menu.
Publishing Documents
When your document is ready, you may publish it to
PDF in order to share it with others. To save a document to PDF
from Swift Publisher or Business Card Composer, choose Export from
the File menu. All the fonts used in the source document will be
embedded into the PDF file, so they can be viewed on any computer
with Adobe Reader or other software reading PDF files installed.
If you’re sending the source document (created
in Business Card Composer for instance) to someone, and
you’ve used some non-system fonts in it, make sure the other
person has these fonts installed on their system — or the
document won’t display propertly.
Getting Fonts
There are lots of free and commercial fonts. Below
you can find a list of Internet resources from where you can buy
fonts or get them for free.
Free Fonts
The chief advantage of free fonts is in their price
(that is, absence thereof). You can find lots of pretty nice free
fonts — however, be prepared that their quality may be different,
and you may find some of them inappropriate for your purposes. For
example, many free fonts are not allowed for commercial use, so you
should check the license prior to using such fonts in your projects.
Many free fonts contain only limited set of characters and often do
not contain full set of extended characters (including international) and symbols.
Here are some links to extensive free fonts resources:
HighFonts.com A brilliant collection of free fonts. Also includes paid fonts and links to other font sites.
FontParadise.com A large collection of free fonts.
Free Fonts Library An index to free font downloads on the About.com.
dafont.com Lots of free and shareware fonts, including fancy, handwriting, dingbats and more.
Abstract Fonts A cool collection of more than 10,000 free fonts that really stand out.
Fonts are often supplied with other software in a bundle — so it’s an alternative way of acquiring fonts at no
additional cost.
Commercial Fonts
Despite so many free fonts
available, there are reasons for buying commercial fonts. Here are
just a few of them:
- Commercial fonts are more carefully designed. With them you
will normally get such niceties as small caps, old style figures,
true ligatures, etc. The difference is especially evident in
printed jobs.
- If you use free fonts — especially TrueType —
you’re more likely to get into trouble at a service bureau.
- With commercial fonts you may qualify for technical support
if anything goes wrong, and also can recover the fonts if you loose
them due to a hard drive crash or the like. Free fonts are more
difficult to track down if you happen to lose them.
- Most free fonts only include Latin character set; it’s
very hard to find free fonts which include international character
sets — but there are many such fonts available for purchase.
Here are some links to commercial font resources:
Fonts.com
A large collection of commercial fonts available for online purchase.
Bitstream.com High-quality fonts for designers, developers. Custom fonts.
FontShop.com A large font warehouse.
Dingbat Pages A large selection of dingbat fonts. Commercial Fonts for Mac and PC A good selection of links to various commercial font sites on the About.com.
Interesting Links
Go Font Yourself! Here you can order a font of your handwriting.
Non-Latin Fonts A collection of links to sites offering non-Latin fonts — Japanese, Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek and more.
Valeriy Ryazanov
Last reviewed: April 2008
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