articles/Software/freeworld-page9

It's an (almost) FREE world! - part 9 of 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

by Mike McNamee Published

GRAPHICS
Fonts


If you are not in possession of lots of fonts you are likely to struggle to find one that suits a project. On the other hand if you are in possession of too many you also have a problem - wading through them all!

www.identifont.com can help you identify a font if you have something that you would like to 'copy' (not too closely please!). It asks a series of questions based on what letters you have available; they may be limited if you are dealing with a logo. The 'expert' system then homes in on likely fonts. A similar service is provided by www.myfonts.com .

Having identified the font, the trick is then to see if a free one is available. A word of warning is in order here. Do not use free or cheap fonts on big projects, intended to go to press, they are often not very well made and can let you down. If you have to use one, you might usefully use the 'convert fonts to outlines' command before preparing your files for the external printer. This prevents any editing but does make for a more secure transfer onto the press RIP.

www.1001freefonts.com offers a huge selection of freeware and shareware fonts. They are categorised into Back Page, 3D, Calligraphic, New Fonts, Handwriting, C Fonts, B Fonts and Comic. If you really need a lot of fonts you can actually download 7,000 of them for $19.95. This is quite a bargain, as top-class fonts can cost $250 for a single family. The sophistication that you get from the classier fonts are things like fractions, Greek alphabets and so on. Professional Imagemaker standardises on Myriad Pro because almost everything you can think of is available; the font atlas from Adobe covers eight pages just for this font family

TextPad

TextPad is shareware and you are expected to pay £16.50 should you decide to keep and use it. It is a simple text editor but has many advantages when you have to deal with occasional goofy text files from all over the world (as we do!). One of the supreme advantages comes from using it in Block Select Mode as this enables you to extract columns of numbers and paste them into other applications - really useful for moving lists of telephone numbers around or unscrambling email messages. It is an excellent script-writing tool for HTML and for Regular Expressions (if you have to ask, you do not need to know!).

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Contact Mike McNamee

1st Published
last update 09/12/2022 14:54:27

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