font

Happy Day, My Fonts Work!

I admit it, I obsess about fonts.  I love fonts. I find every excuse I can to buy a new font. I believe that fonts are a critical aspect in turning a good-looking graphic into an eye-catching graphic, even (especially) if it's the banner to a website. I have purchased a lot of fonts over the years, and I was told at the Apple store that the fonts I purchased for the Windows OS were not going to work on my iMac. That seriously bummed me. With the tiniest hope I tried copying my font folder from Windows onto my new iMac, then adding them to my Font Book, but it didn't work.

There was one font I desperately wanted to use, so I tried again even though I knew it would be to no avail. This time I took my original file download and copied that onto my iMac. Note the difference - I didn't copy from the Windows Fonts folder, I copied the original .TTF file I had downloaded. I then added it to the Font Book (found in Applications), and it worked! I have since added numerous True Type Fonts and Open Type Fonts (OTF), and they've all worked so far, as long as I used the original download. Hooray!!!


Trying to Identify a Font

Have you ever seen a font and wished you knew what it was? Perhaps a client gives you a printed brochure with font they want to match, or an old business card. Without knowing what font was used originally, it's difficult to recreate something from magic. Never fear, you can convince your clients you have a rabbit in your hat.

MyFonts offers a fabulous free service to help solve your quandry. What The Font! lets you upload a sample of the font as an image (for instance a scan of a printed document, or even a photograph of a sign), the site analyzes the letters, and they return a list of fonts that are most similar to the submitted sample. It's a great way to quickly and easily find the font you need, or at least one similar enough you can fool your viewers. After identifying the mystery font, you can typically purchase and download the font from the MyFonts site too, a complete solution in less than 5 minutes.

http://www.WhatTheFont.com