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Fonts
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One
of the most understated and least recognized areas of design pertains
to fonts. Using a certain font can make or break your project. This section
will help you understand them. Want
the whole story? Try
reading our fonts overview!
So,
What Are Fonts Anyway?
The
word font was, at one time, used to indicate a certain size of a certain
typeface. Producing new fonts was no easy task. Back in the early days
of printing, A font had to be crafted by hand in a very time-consuming
and precise manner. It sometimes took years before a family of fonts were
ready to be used. Today, ...read
more
What Are Expert
Font Sets?
Because
font files are limited to containing 256 characters within them, font
manufacturers like Adobe (one of the biggest producers of fonts
and the creator of the PostScript
font) often offer what is called an Expert font set. Expert font sets
contain...read more
Jagged Fonts Explained
Say
you're a designer working with a friend or coworker on their computer
system (Macintosh or Windows) and you realize that their fonts look different
from yours. They're the same typefaces but theirs look much better than
yours do. Theirs have nice even edges while yours seem to be straight
from the pyramids in Egypt; built with little steps of stone. What's the
deal? Do they have more expensive fonts than you do? A better monitor?
No, I doubt it but there are two possibilities that I can think of....read
more
All About PostScript
PostScript is the technology that
really brought the desktop publishing industry into the professional publishing
world. Without it, I doubt you would be reading this site and I certainly
wouldn't have written it. Before PostScript, designers working with computers
didn't have the exacting control over printed output that exists today.
PostScript is...read
more
Why
You Need Both Screen & Printer Fonts
Screen and printer
fonts are necessary components for using PostScript
fonts in a design project. A very common mistake that designers can make
is to provide only the screen fonts when sending a project to a printer.
(Some are used to using TrueType
fonts which only have one file per font.) Both, however, are absolutely
necessary for correctly outputing a job. Screen fonts, as the name implies...read
more
Standard
Font Characters
How
does a designer create a copyright symbol or a trademark symbol in their
documents? They're not on my keyboard?! It's not a big typesetting secret
but, instead, just a combination of keyboard keys. Not a big deal, unless
you don't know what they are....read
more
Why
Font Styling Isn't a Good Idea
If
you've ever used a page
layout program you've noticed that one can choose to style fonts (making
them bold, italic, etc.) using a style menu or one can choose the actual
font from the font menu. The choice seems easy enough. It takes longer
to go to the font menu and find say, Futura Bold, than to just bold the
Futura regular font you're already using. Why shouldn't designers take
the quicker route? There's a few reasons why not. Though the bolding of
Futura Regular might look fine on the screen,...read
more
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