by Dan Logan
Windows 98 provides several fonts that enable you to vary the look of your onscreen and printed text. A font is a set of characters in a single style defined by size, weight, and other features. Fonts are often members of type faces (type families) that are variations on that same style, for example Arial, Arial Black, Arial Bold, Arial Bold Italic, and Arial Italic. The Arial font is shown in Figure 23.1.
FIG. 23.1 The Windows 98 Arial font of the Arial type family.
There are two general categories of fonts: bitmap fonts and scaleable fonts. Bitmapped (raster) fonts are tailored to the pixels on a monitor or the dots of ink put down by a printer. They are fixed in size; they can be enlarged or reduced, but their edges become jagged in the process.
Bitmapped fonts look best in the sizes in which they were created. At even multiples of their original size they might scale well, but in other sizes, or rotated, the likelihood is that the image quality will suffer. Generally speaking, bitmapped fonts should not be enlarged.
Scaleable fonts, originally developed for high-end computers and printers, allow you to change the size of the font while retaining the characters' proportions and without causing the edges of the letters to become jagged.
Windows 98 uses Microsoft TrueType fonts, which are scaleable. Every character in a TrueType font is stored as an outline that is used in the creation of every size of that character. The TrueType font file also contains all the other data it needs to produce an image, including the rules (hints) for fine-tuning the outline of the character at any given size. When the image has been sized, Windows rasterizes it to produce the image best suited to the capabilities of the monitor or printer, even if the monitor or printer is capable only of low resolutions. Hinting is needed on low-resolution monitors and printers, including VGA monitors and 300 dpi laser printers.
Windows 98 comes with a collection of TrueType and bitmap fonts (see Table 23.1). These are installed in the Fonts folder (c:\windows\fonts). TrueType fonts have the extension .TTF, whereas bitmap fonts have .FON extensions (see Figure 23.2). You can add more fonts to the system or remove many of them. You can install roughly 1,000 TrueType fonts in Windows 98. (The number is limited by the file size limits for the Registry key and the graphics device interface.)
FIG. 23.2 When you view font files as large icons, TrueType fonts display a TrueType icon.
Windows ships with a number of fonts that serve special purposes. Windows uses a small number of system fonts to create its own screens (see Table 23.1). Deleting these fonts can cause glitches on your Windows screens or prevent you from booting Windows. OEM fonts support older equipment installed on the system. And the fixed-width fonts provide compatibility with older versions of Windows.
Windows 98 also supplies a few vector fonts. Vector fonts are a type of scaleable font typically used with plotters and high-resolution output devices. Modern.fon is a vector font.
| Font Filename | Description |
| VGASYS.FON | VGA (640*480) resolution system font |
| VGAOEM.FON | VGA (640*480) resolution terminal font |
| VGAFIX.FON | VGA (640*480) resolution monospaced system font |
| 8514SYS.FON | 8514/a (1024*768) resolution system font |
| 8514OEM.FON | 8514/a (1024*768) resolution terminal font |
| 8514FIX.FON | 8514/a (1024*768) resolution monospaced system font |
| VGA850.FON | VGA (640*480) resolution terminal font (International) |
The Fonts folder in Control Panel works a bit differently from other folders. You can preview the system fonts and TrueType fonts in the Fonts folder using the Windows 98 font viewer. To see the fonts that come with Windows 98, follow these steps:
NOTE: Keep in mind the term "activate" means click if the web desktop is enabled and double-click if it isn't.
You can use this procedure to preview a font file even if it is located in another folder. Font files need not be in the Fonts folder. New printer fonts can be installed when you install a new printer; these new fonts won't be placed in the Fonts folder, but they will show up with the fonts listed in Windows programs, such as Word for Windows.
Following is a list of the TrueType fonts that come with Windows 98. These additional fonts are available as both screen and printer fonts.
| Arial | Small Fonts (VGA resolution) |
| Arial Black | Small Fonts (8514/a resolution) |
| Arial Bold | Symbol |
| Arial Bold Italic | Symbol 8,10,12,14,18,24 |
| Arial Italic | Tahoma |
| Comic Sans MS | Tahoma Bold |
| Comic Sans MS Bold | Times New Roman |
| Courier New | Times New Roman Bold |
| Courier New Bold | Times New Roman Bold Italic |
| Courier New Bold Italic | Times New Roman Italic |
| Courier 10,12,15 (VGA resolution) | Verdana |
| Courier 10,12,15 (8514/a resolution) | Verdana Bold |
| Courier New Italic | Verdana Bold Italic |
| Non-Windows Application Font | Verdana Italic |
| Impact | Webdings |
| Marlett | WingDings |
| Modern | |
| MS Sans Serif 8,10,12,14,18,24 | |
| MS Serif 8,10,12,14,18,24 |
There are hundreds of fonts available that you can purchase or find for free on the Internet. However, new fonts must be installed, not simply copied into the Fonts folder, in order for Windows and Windows applications to recognize them.
To add a font to the Fonts folder, follow these steps:
NOTE: If you want to add more than one font, press and hold the Ctrl key while activating the font files you want to add.
If you are on a network, you can add fonts from a network drive without using your computer's disk space. To do this, follow these steps:
ON THE WEB:
Microsoft periodically makes more TrueType fonts available for no charge at http://www.microsoft.com/typography/free.htm.
To print a sample of a font, follow this procedure:
NOTE: If you want to choose more than one font, press and hold the Ctrl key; then activate each font you want.
Using the Windows 98 font utility, you can look at useful information about the font file on the Properties sheet. Follow these steps:
The Properties sheet for a TrueType font has a single tab called General (see Figure 23.3) that shows the font file name, type of file, location, size, attributes, and other information.
FIG. 23.3 Font Properties--General tab.
For other types of font files such as .FON files, the Properties sheet will also show a Version tab. See Figure 23.4, which shows additional information about the font file, including the file version, description, copyright, and other version information including company name, internal name, language, original filename, and product version.
FIG. 23.4 Font Properties-- Version tab.
Many users will not need dozens or hundreds of fonts. If you don't use many fonts and would rather have more disk space, you can delete many of the fonts. To uninstall a font and delete it to the Recycle Bin, follow these steps:
NOTE: If you want to delete more than one font, press and hold the Ctrl key while activating each of the fonts.
If you want to uninstall a TrueType font without deleting it from your hard drive, you must create a folder where you can keep a copy of the font file. To uninstall a TrueType font without deleting it (the font information will remain in the Registry), follow these steps:
When you want to reinstall a font you removed, follow these steps:
When a font is installed, Windows 98 applications can access it. Figures 23.5 and 23.6 show the font dialog boxes for WordPad and Word. To access the font dialog box from within the application, follow these steps:
ON THE WEB: Microsoft maintains an informative Typography page at http://www.microsoft.com/typography/. Here you can find details on the development of TrueType, free TrueType fonts and utilities, developer information, descriptions of the features of TrueType and OpenType, and links to other typography-related sites.
If you do a lot of document design and use a variety of fonts, you spend a fair amount of time installing and previewing fonts, printing out font samples, and studying font file properties. The Windows 98 applet for managing fonts gives you the tools to perform these tasks--and also to sort the available fonts by their similarity to the font.
FIG. 23.5 Font Access in WordPad.
FIG. 23.6 Font Access in Microsoft Word 97.
To sort the fonts in the Fonts folder according to their similarity to a specified font, follow these steps:
The fonts are sorted as very similar, fairly similar, or not similar.
Although the Windows 98 font manager will handle many tasks, third-party font management software is available that can provide more extensive capabilities if you must manage large numbers of fonts. For example, there are third-party font managers that will group fonts into sets that suit your work habits, activating or deactivating a font or sets of fonts as you need them.
Adobe Type Manager (ATM) Deluxe version 4.0 from Adobe Systems allows you to manage not only Windows TrueType fonts but Adobe PostScript Type 1 scaleable fonts. (Earlier versions of ATM didn't work with TrueType files; TrueType fonts, while in some instances appearing very much like their Adobe counterparts, are not the same and do not share the same file formats.) Heavy font users often have Type 1 fonts in their collections. Adobe sells more than 2,000 Type 1 typefaces.
ATM (see Figure 23.7) has other useful features. It can simulate fonts that a document calls for but aren't on your computer. It will automatically load an inactive font into Windows when a document calls for it. It can use anti-aliasing to smooth the edges of Type 1 fonts, and it has a multiple master feature that you can use to create your own typefaces.
ON THE WEB: You can find an overview of Adobe Type Manager Deluxe 4.0 at http://www.adobe.com/prodindex/atm/overview.html.
FIG. 23.7 Adobe Type Manager Control Panel.
There are other popular font managers such as Bitstream Font Navigator, Agfa Font Manager, and FontMinder. FontMinder was created by Ares Software Corporation, but Adobe purchased the program from Ares in 1996, and some of its features, in particular the capability to automatically activate sets of fonts when a given application is launched, might be incorporated into Adobe Type Manager in the future.
With Microsoft TrueType and Adobe's Type 1 fonts, you might have all the font power you need. However, there are other font technologies such as Bitstream TrueDoc, Monotype ESQ, and Adobe's Type 3 format that can extend the range of typefaces available to you.
Adobe Type 3 fonts are used by a narrow market of print professionals. Type 3 fonts come in both scaleable and bitmapped fonts, but they don't use hinting. The Type 3 format was designed to produce high-quality output on high-end PostScript-capable printers and service bureau imagesetters that have hardware for interpreting PostScript commands. Type 3 fonts make use of the full set of PostScript PDL capabilities.
Bitmapped fonts are best used at their design sizes. Enlarging bitmapped fonts produce jagged edges ("jaggies"). And how the font looks onscreen also depends on the resolution capabilities of the monitor and graphics card. At lower resolutions, instead of smooth lines or smooth curves, you might see jagged edges on the characters in your display or print output. Jaggies will appear when the monitor or printer doesn't have the resolution to display a smooth line.
Font smoothing or anti-aliasing is a method used to make the edges of characters appear smoother. To turn on font smoothing in Windows 98, follow this procedure:
If your text still doesn't appear smooth enough for your purposes, you might need to purchase a monitor and graphics card capable of higher resolutions.
One of the computer user's most frustrating problems develops when the printed page coming out of the printer doesn't match what is seen onscreen. Fonts are one of the likely culprits for this problem. If the printer doesn't have access to the same font shown onscreen, the font that is substituted is likely to have minute differences that are enough to throw off spacing.
How do you make sure the screen and printer fonts are the same? Windows applications using TrueType download the fonts to the printer, so the printer uses the same fonts as on the screen.
Although in most cases you want the same screen and printer fonts, there are circumstances in which you want to use screen fonts in your document that your printer cannot print. This is useful if the document will be printed on another printer or used by a service bureau on an imagesetter. In this case, you can select fonts that you know are supported by the other printer or service bureau, and you can see onscreen how your document will look, even though you can't obtain an accurate printout from your own printer.
TIP: Keep in mind that most Windows TrueType and Adobe PS fonts are licensed and copyrighted, and they can't legally be copied to a disk or across a network unless covered by license.
The appearance of the text and graphics on a page printed on a laser printer is controlled through a page description language (PDL). The two standard page description languages are Adobe's PostScript and Hewlett-Packard's Printer Control Language (PCL). PCL and PostScript printers will both run under Windows 98. Windows 98 uses a 32-bit universal printer driver that works with the printer-specific drivers supplied by printer manufacturers for their machines.
Hewlett-Packard was one of the pioneers in laser printer development for personal computers. The Hewlett-Packard LaserJet series is the standard for laser printers, and other manufacturers adopt a subset of the PCL commands in their printer drivers for some degree of HP compatibility.
PostScript became the standard for desktop publishing because service bureaus have used it for years with their imagesetters to produce camera-ready copy. Users' familiarity with PostScript has helped it retain its dominant position despite competition from Hewlett-Packard and TrueType.
Your printer can be configured using the Windows 98 Printer Properties screen. The Windows 98 Printer Properties screen gives you useful information about your printer's configuration and enables you to control its operation. Each printer has its own configuration options, and these vary widely among printers (see Figure 23.8).
To use the Printer Properties screen, follow these steps:
FIG. 23.8 The Fonts tab on this Printer Properties screen shows the choices available on an HP LaserJet PostScript printer.
Printers come with resident fonts--some with more, some with less, depending on the model. A resident font is a font permanently stored in a printer's read-only memory. You can also add fonts by inserting font cartridges designed for the printer or by downloading soft fonts from the computer.
Some laser printers have slots that accept font cartridges, which are read-only memory boards loaded with a collection of fonts. Font cartridges have the advantage of using none of the computer or printer memory.
Printers can also take advantage of soft fonts. A soft font is one that is downloaded from the computer to the printer's random access memory (RAM) (it is also referred to as a downloadable font). The TrueType fonts that come with Windows 98 are soft fonts. Soft fonts use both disk space and printer memory. If you don't have enough memory in your printer to handle your printing needs (including a set of soft fonts), look into installing more RAM; on most laser printers you can increase the amount of RAM. Soft fonts must be downloaded to the printer and that takes time, but when they are downloaded, subsequent print jobs will print faster.
To force the use of TrueType fonts on a PostScript printer, follow these steps:
The computer's keyboard offers only a worm's-eye view of the characters available to the user. To present what is actually available to users in a particular font, Windows 98 uses the Character Map (see Figure 23.9).
FIG. 23.9 In the lower-right corner of the window, the Character Map for MS Sans Serif shows the keystroke shortcut for the character. To insert a character from the Character Map, follow this procedure:
There are keyboard shortcuts that will allow you to insert extended ASCII characters in your documents. These shortcuts eliminate your having to keep returning to the Character Map. You can create a document with your most frequently used keyboard shortcuts or create macros for them in your Windows applications.
Figure 23.9 shows the keystroke combination for the character ú. To use the keystroke shortcut to a character, follow these steps:
To give a taste of the plethora of distinctive fonts available to users beyond those that come with Windows 98, Windows includes three TrueType fonts of signs and symbols. Wingdings.ttf is an array of pointers and borders that can be used to dress up a document. Symbol.ttf is a collection of characters including the uppercase and lowercase Greek alphabets for mathematical and scientific notation and common business use. And the recently developed Webdings.ttf typeface reflects the growing interest in the Internet with a selection of characters for Web designers; these font images will move more quickly across the Internet than graphics files will.
The Internet has expanded the concept of document publishing. In its early days the Net used only a limited number of fonts. But with the introduction of the graphically oriented World Wide Web and the spreading recognition of the Internet's possibilities, users demanded greater typeface options than the Net was capable of providing.
Typeface limitations revived the old problem of making onscreen and printed output look the same. There are widespread efforts being made to overcome the typeface limitations inherent in existing HTML specifications. The World Wide Web Consortium, an organization founded to develop common protocols for the evolution of the web, has identified the following typeface-related needs that must be addressed in order to give users greater flexibility in their use of fonts on the Internet or on intranets: A font format that supports resolution independence, kerning, and ligatures
A mechanism for downloading fonts and converting them to the platform format
An inventory of fonts available over the Net, and copyright protection and payment schemes for those fonts A means for addressing, naming, and matching fonts on the web
ON THE WEB: For information and discussion of developments regarding fonts and the World Wide Web, visit the World Wide Web Consortium's Fonts and the web page at http://www.w3.org/Fonts/. There's also a mailing list for font/web issues at www-font; subscribe by sending the word subscribe to www-font-request@w3.org.
To overcome the problem of disrupted document formatting due to changed fonts, font vendors are incorporating font embedding technology that allows you to embed the needed fonts in the document file.
Windows 98 supports TrueType font embedding. There are four levels of font embedding, and the TrueType font vendor builds the embedding level into the font. The embedding levels include the following:
TIP: A useful tool that will help you with embedding is Microsoft's font properties extension for Windows. Download the free self-extracting file ttftext.exe fromhttp://www.microsoft.com/typography/property/property.htm.
When the software is installed, the font properties extension (see Figure 23.10) adds tabs to the Properties screen to give you additional information about a font. Activating the Embedding tab tells you the embedding level of the font.
FIG. 23.10 You can install the Font Properties extension applet for more information about your font files.
To save a file with embedded fonts in a Windows application such as Microsoft Word 97, follow these steps:
OpenType is a new format initiative by Microsoft and Adobe, aimed at making it easier for users to use and organize sets of TrueType and PostScript Type 1 fonts onscreen and in print. An OpenType font can have either TrueType outlines, Type 1 outlines, or both. Type 1 files can be rasterized by a Type 1 rasterizer or converted to TrueType data for rasterization.
The OpenType format will enable Web page designers to use high-quality fonts in their online documents. The new format should also reduce download times.
Windows 98 offers multilanguage support. Windows 98 supports Greek and Turkish, and the Baltic, Central European, and Cyrillic language groups. With this support enabled, you can view documents written in these scripts. With multilanguage support installed, a 652-character set is available in the Arial, Courier New, and Times Roman fonts.
To install the multilanguage support, follow this procedure:
If you want to write or edit documents in any of these languages, you must add keyboard support for the language. To do so, follow these steps:
When you have installed multilanguage and keyboard support, the language indicator will be displayed on the taskbar. You can choose a toggle (Left Alt+Shift or Ctrl+Shift) to switch between two language scripts. The taskbar will show the language currently active (see Figure 23.11).
Windows 98 supports other languages such as Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Arabic, but you must buy a language-specific version of the program to do so. These versions also support the pan-European language groups.
FIG. 23.11 The active language (in this instance "EN" for English) is displayed on the Windows 98 taskbar.
© Copyright, Macmillan Computer Publishing. All rights reserved.
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