Font

[jyl]

Now for something really important.

What fonts do you use? Do you use one font for certain things and another for other things? Why do you like those fonts?

[stomachmonkey]

Originally Posted by jyl

Now for something really important.

What fonts do you use? Do you use one font for certain things and another for other things? Why do you like those fonts?

I honestly own somewhere around 10k fonts.

I've switched nearly exclusively to google fonts.

Mostly out of convenience, utility, and portability and they've got some really great modern stuff that works really well. https://fonts.google.com/

Many of them solve the age old problem of highly legible fonts are boring and visually interesting fonts are difficult to read.

They have a nice mix of interesting yet still legible fonts.

Also makes life so much simpler when you don't have to worry about using fonts that you know are not on your end users PC's and the facility to deliver them is more or less built in.

Plus they are free. I'd be thrilled to get $0.10 back on every dollar I've spent on fonts over the last 30 or so years.

[id10t]

Fixed size 12 point serif for coding. Sans-serif for most anything else.

http://www.lowing.org/fonts/

And all Freely licensed on my systems

[M.D. Holloway]

Is there a program where I can scan in my handwriting with upper and lower case letters, numbers and some symbols and create my own font?

[M.D. Holloway]

found these

Handwriting font creator

Font Generator - Make Your Own Handwriting Font With Your Fonts

[id10t]

Originally Posted by M.D. Holloway

Is there a program where I can scan in my handwriting with upper and lower case letters, numbers and some symbols and create my own font?

You would need to save the images as scalable vector images to handle sizing. Not to mention variations for bold italic etc

Creating a good font is hard work. One of the reasons the famous Porsche font doesn't have the complete alphabet.

[CurtEgerer]

31,000 free fonts here: DaFont - Download fonts I use this fairly often.

[legion]

I use Comic Sans for everything.

[stomachmonkey]

Originally Posted by M.D. Holloway

found these

Handwriting font creator

Font Generator - Make Your Own Handwriting Font With Your Fonts

It'll only work on your machine, PDF's set to embed fonts, or for stuff you print a hard copy of from your machine.

If you use it, for example, in an email, the recipient won't see it unless you send them the font and they install it.

And yes, making a good font is hard.

[Por_sha911]

Years ago I bought Font CD's and software that came with 100's of fonts. I probably have close to 1000 fonts. I use less than 50 of them 95% of the time.

What do you need the fonts for? If you are in the advertising business then you need new and different. For creating a sign, banner, birthday card a few hundred favorites fits just fine.

[RKDinOKC]

Serif fonts were designed for books to help keep your eye focused on the line you are reading.
San-serif fonts were originally to stick out as headlines and text with only a few paragraphs (news papers)
Official letters were typically in Serif as that is what type writers used.
Now with email more prevalent San Serif are much more the norm for official letters and are typically the default in email programs.

The key is to NOT use too many different fonts on a single page, then it becomes confusing and messy looking despite what some artists say (lol).

The exception being decorative fonts used for headlines to separate articles (newletters and magazines).

The most common sans serif fonts are Helvetica and Arial.
The most common serif fonts are Times and Palatino.
Those are available with many different varieties of lightness, boldness and condensed or expanded.

Others are used, but are mostly a personal preference. Typically a company sets a default font for it's body text and a couple for headlines, etc. They are part of the companies logo/letterhead image package and are to re-inforce a branding look and feel.

When I was supervisor of a companies drafting department all published drawings and illustrations were inked with leroy lettering templates. While supervisor we went from penciled mechanical drawings and inked illustrations to Computer Aided Drawing and Design, CADD. I personally using a program called Fontographer created a couple of variations of Leroy Lettering as fonts to be used by the CADD systems. Had originally found a company that I sent all the characters in leroy lettering and they sent me back a font. I say I created the fonts because I had to fix most of the characters and set the font spacing to work correctly (the difficult part). Then I developed bold, italics, and condensed versions. Did it basically to help tie the manual drawings and computer drawings together. The company still uses those fonts for drawings and illustrations today.

[RKDinOKC]

Most modern browsers and email programs use html and have a basic set of fonts installed you can use that will provide similar results on any platform.
There are several available to this message board if you go to advanced. <- Comic Sans

Using custom fonts in electronic documents can be done easily if those documents are PDF.
And now you can include custom font's in HTML on web pages if the fonts you use are hosted somewhere.

Not sure if including custom fonts (hosted) is a default for html emails yet or not. Do know that if you include images that are hosted somewhere as opposed to included as attachments your message will get a higher spam score and runs the risk of being quarantined and not delivered to it's intended recipient's inbox. Assume that linking fonts will also increase the spam score. Recently went thru this with our Marketing department and they wanted to send sales emails with all kinds of fonts and graphics linked to instead of included as attachments. The difference is that virus and spam scanners can scan attachments, but can't verify whether links are changed between when an email comes in and when it is viewed so email anitspam antivirus scores messages with links as spam.

[Bill Douglas]

I'm an Arial boy myself. If I'm making a sign or something like that I certainly get more adventurous.

[Holger]

I am using Arial and Helvetica for everything.
Comic Sans gives me headache!

[wdfifteen]

I use Times New Roman for everything that's going to be printed.

[Paul_Heery]

I just downloaded the Noto font.

https://www.google.com/get/noto/

[stomachmonkey]

Originally Posted by RKDinOKC

Not sure if including custom fonts (hosted) is a default for html emails yet or not. Do know that if you include images that are hosted somewhere as opposed to included as attachments your message will get a higher spam score and runs the risk of being quarantined and not delivered to it's intended recipient's inbox. Assume that linking fonts will also increase the spam score. Recently went thru this with our Marketing department and they wanted to send sales emails with all kinds of fonts and graphics linked to instead of included as attachments. The difference is that virus and spam scanners can scan attachments, but can't verify whether links are changed between when an email comes in and when it is viewed so email anitspam antivirus scores messages with links as spam.

You can't build a graphically rich marketing communication or newsletter by attaching everything.

If your marketing guys are not using a legitimate email marketing service like iContact then that's going to be a problem whether you link out or embed as attachments.

And FWIW, lots of attached images is a spam trigger, especially when the ratio of text in the body is low.

[DaveE]

I use whatever the default font is.

Apparently.

[jyl]

My eyesight is poor and I spend all day staring at monitors with lots of small size tezt and numbers (causation?). I'm trying to find out which fonts are easiest to read in smallish sizes.

[RKDinOKC]

Oh they are using a marketing service, they also want every employees email to include marketing based signatures and formatting.

jyl, get a bigger monitor and configure the system so the monitor is lower resolution. That is what I did when I was having vision problems. My monitor is 27in and capable of 2560x1440. When my vision was not so good, Cadillacs, set it to 1280x720. Made everything much bigger and more readable. Now that my vision is better I still like 2048x1152 better than 2560x1440.