Font Load Unload is a free portable software for the Windows operating system that can load fonts without installing them on the system. Fonts loaded this way become accessible as if they were installed on the system until the Windows session is ended, for instance by logging off, shutting down or restarting the PC.

The program displays a list of all installed and loaded fonts in the program interface on start up.

You can load a font either by dragging and dropping it onto the load button in the program interface or by clicking the Load button to select the fonts using a standard Windows file browser.

Once a font has been loaded it becomes selectable just like any other font on the system. This includes programs such as Microsoft Office, image editors like Paint.Net or Photoshop, or web browsers and email clients.

Fonts can be unloaded during a session by selecting them in the program interface and clicking on Unload afterwards.

The program supports saving a list of loaded fonts to load that list and all fonts included in later sessions.

The core benefit of Font Load Unload is that it adds fonts to a system temporarily. While it is possible to install and uninstall fonts as well, it would require that the user would remember to uninstall all temporarily loaded fonts before changing the system’s power state.

With Font Load Unload that is not necessary. Another benefit is the portable nature of the program. You may not have permission to install fonts on a computer system. Loading fonts however may work so that you can use fonts that are not installed on the system.

Windows users can download Font Load Unload from the developer website. The program is compatible with all 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the operating system.

Font making programs are not that easy to come by. The really good ones are expensive – very expensive for what non-font buffs would think is a pretty silly expense. Options include industry standard FontLab Studio, coming it at a respectable $650, FontCreator a relative bargain at $70, and the behemoth DTL (Dutch Type Library) FontMaster, which costs a turns-your-life-upside-down $3000.

There are free options. Unfortunately, they can be a bit of a hassle to get installed. One such program, FontForge, is a an application that has nearly all the options as the standard, FontLab Studio. Yet the process to install the program takes a little time and can be very confusing without a little help.

To create a font, such a program is absolutely necessary. So if you want to build your own and have already acquired everything else you will need (a scanner, some kind of raster graphic software like Photoshop or Gimp, some kind of vector graphic software like Illustrator, a pen, and paper) and really just need to get a font making program on computer, this how-to will get you through the installation process for FontForge.

First, FontForge was not originally made for Windows – the developers preferred Mac and, surprisingly, Linux. To get their Windows version to run properly you must begin by downloading Cygwin. It’s a very simple install, simply download the free executable and run the installer. When you reach the page that asks what specific packages you would like to install, go with the default options except add everything from the bottom set, titled X11, and the search for and check binutils, libpng, libjpeg, and libxml2. Click next, and then allow it to add any dependencies to the list to install.

Once you have installed Cygwin, click here to download the latest version of FontForge. Once the file has finished downloading, copy it into the default user’s file within Cygwin’s directory. For most computers this will be found at C:\cygwin\home\[your username]. Next, open a Cygwin window and type the following:

bunzip2 fontforge_full-20110222.tar.bz2
tar xf fontforge_full-20110222.tar
cd fontforge
./doinstall

You now have FontForge on your computer. However, as with pretty much everything in dealing with this program, you are not quite finished yet. Any time you want to open the program, go back into Cygwin and type:

C:\cygwin\usr\X11R6\bin\startxwin.bat

A new window will appear. In it type:

twm &

And then:

fontforge –new

At long last, FontForge is ready for you to use.

Enjoy making your own fonts, and just remember that you cannot start the program like you can most others on Windows.

It’s a simple service to use too with two ways to find out what font is being used on a website or in a logo (or any other graphic come to that).  You can either upload an image to the service, all the main graphics formats and files up to 2Mb are supprted, or you can point the service at a particular website.

Once you’ve done that the site will dissect the text and images and presents you with a series of images, within each one it tries to recognise a single letter, number or symbol.  If it does it will automatically insert the correct character in a box underneath, but it will give you blank boxes for any images it doesn’t recognise a character in, just in case its missed one.

In the tests I put it through it proved extremely accurate, not failing to spot any letters in images and providing several excellent alternatives for the font families used, giving me a choice of which one I thought was most appropriate.

So if you want to find out what font A or B has used on X or Y, now you can as easily as uploading a single image.

A good way to save printer ink using optimization is to remove elements that are not needed in a printout. A user who wants to print out an article on a website might not need the menus, advertisements and comments that go along with it on the website. The second option comes down to specifying a print quality and font.

Ecofont has been designed for this exact purpose. Its nature does not make it applicable for all printouts but should be fine for internal printouts. The font makes use of a very obvious observation which centers around the idea that a font with less visible areas requires less ink. Ecofont therefor is a font with holes. This holes can save up to 20% of the usual amount of ink needed to print pages with a normal font.

It should be pretty obvious that this font is usually not one that should be used to print out important papers. Ecofont is offered as a free download at the creator’s website.

Not so with Font Friend, a bookmarklet that simplifies the font selection process greatly. A click on the bookmarklet on any website will display it in an overlay in the lower left corner of the browser window. The font selector can be used to change various characteristics of the fonts used on a website. The options are divided into font family, font variant, font weight, text transform and a html element selector.

The html element selector defines the elements on the page that will be affected by the font change. Included are headline tags, body, paragraphs and the option to select a custom element.

The font family offers a selection of 23 different font families including the popular families arial, verdana, times new roman and georgia. Font variants can further change the appearance of the fonts on the active website.

Webmasters who are currently testing various fonts for their website might want to check out the bookmarklet which can be simply added to the bookmarks and executed by left-clicking it on the right website.

Private characters are symbols which only work on machine on which they’re installed and correctly allocated. This may be useful if like a company logos or foreign script have to be frequently included into documents, and I expect it is more efficient than adding many images.

eudcedit.exe has minimal tools (a few simple shapes, a pencil, a brush and an eraser!), but it does allow a private character to be created in a fairly simplistic manner.

To use Private Character Editor, go to run and enter ‘eudcedit.exe’. Once it is open, you have to find an empty code point (an unused Unicode character) to use. Then, it is quite self-explanatory. After the character has been saved, to insert it, use Character Map.

Some virus scanners highlight this file as a trojan, but it comes with Windows so that is fairly unlikely.

The University of Heidelberg has a graphical tutorial on eudcedit.exe.

It is definitely worth noting that any characters you make on Private Character Editor will not work on any other computers, but it may still be useful should a symbol frequently be used.

(via Download Squad)