Fonts
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A guide to finding, using and installing fonts.

To install a font on a computer, you will need to:
  • Download the fonts you want.
  • Uncompress the files if they are compressed.
  • Click the start button on the lower left hand side of your monitor, then go to control panel, then click on a folder called fonts.
  • click on file in the upper right hand of the window and then install font. Use the screen to find the location of the font and then install it.

  • Here is a list of some font sites I have found and used personally.

  • There is also software that allows you to view fonts on your computer and even print a list of them out.
A computer font is an electronic data file containing a set of glyphs, characters, or symbols such as dingbats. Although the term "font" once referred to interchangeable typefaces using mechanical components such as a typeball element or a daisy wheel, most modern fonts are used in computing. There are three basic kinds of computer font file data formats:
  • Bitmap fonts consist of a series of dots or pixels representing the image of each glyph in each face and size.
  • Outline fonts use Bezier curves, drawing instructions and mathematical formulas to describe each glyph, which make the character outlines scalable to any size.
  • Stroke fonts use a series of specified lines and additional information to define the profile, or size and shape of the line in a specific face and size, which together describe the appearance of the glyph.

    Bitmap fonts are faster and easier to use in computer code, but inflexible, requiring a separate font for each size and each face. Outline and stroke fonts can be resized using a single font and substituting different measurements for components of each glyph, but are somewhat more complicated to use than bitmap fonts as they require additional computer code to render them. For example, the letter "A" has three components, the two lines on the outside and the bar between the two outside lines, and may have more if the design has serifs.

    Bitmap fonts versus outline fonts can be compared to the two main types of image file formats. Bitmap image formats such as Windows Bitmap (.bmp), Portable Network Graphics (.png), Joint Photographic Experts Group (.jpg or .jpeg) and Tagged Image Format (.tif or .tiff), store the image data as a grid of pixels, in some cases with compression. Outline or stroke image formats such as Windows Metafile format (.wmf) and Scalable Vector Graphics format (.svg), store instructions of how to draw the image rather than storing the image itself.

    A bitmap image can be displayed in a different size only with some distortion, but renders quickly; outline or stroke image formats are resizable but take more time to render as pixels must be drawn from scratch each time they are displayed.

    Computer font. (2007, January 18). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 03:44, January 26, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Computer_font&oldid=101604627
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    Last updated January 25, 2007