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.

Microsoft has acknowledged the issue under windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2. The company notes in the official Microsoft Support listing that “core fonts in Internet Explorer 9″ may appear “blurred compared with the same text and fonts in Windows Internet Explorer 8″.

The fonts showing those behaviors are Arial, Verdana and Tahoma all on regular font styles and font sizes of 8,9 and 10 points.

This issue is caused by different font rendering techniques:

By default, Internet Explorer 9 uses sub-pixel positioned ClearType to render text by using DirectWrite, whereas Internet Explorer 8 uses whole-pixel positioned ClearType to render text by using the Microsoft Windows graphics device interface (GDI).

Microsoft has released updates for all versions of Windows that Internet Explorer 9 is compatible with. This includes the client operating systems Windows Vista and Windows 7, as well as the server operating systems Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

• Windows 7 x86
• Windows 7 x64
• Windows Vista x86
• Windows Vista x64
• Windows Server 2008 x86
• Windows Server 2008 x64
• Windows Server 2008 IA-64
• Windows Server 2008 R2 x64
• Windows Server 2008 R2 IA-64

All update downloads require a validation before they become available.

The Windows PC needs to be restarted after the update installation.

The Knowledge Base article lists additional information about the update and the changes that it makes to the system. Microsoft mentions Internet Explorer 9 explicitly in the article, other programs however may benefit from the updated fonts as well. (via)

Please let everyone know if you noticed a change for the better or worse after installing the update on your system.

You need to do the following to disable hardware acceleration. Click the Firefox button, and then Options from the menu. Users who have enabled the old menubar need to click on Tools > Options instead.

Hardware acceleration is an option under Advanced > General in the options window. Uncheck “Use hardware acceleration when available” to disable the feature in Firefox. The changes should be visible after a restart of the web browser.

Disabling hardware acceleration impacts several areas of the browser, not only font rendering. Users may experience slower page rendering or multimedia applications afterwards. Before you do something that drastic, you may want to update the drivers of your graphics adapter first.

Some users were able to correct the font display issues in Firefox after installing the Anti-Aliasing Tuner add-on for the browser. The extension basically offers in depths configuration font rendering options.

With the help of this tool it is possible to tweak the Firefox font rendering settings. The add-on distinguishes between small and large fonts, and offers the same set of customizable options for both.

Available for selection are four anti-aliasing modes, including ClearType, Aliased and Default. The rendering modes that become available depend on the mode that was selected. Among the rendering options are GDI Classic and Natural, Aliased, Natural and Default.

The two remaining options can be used to enhance the contrast by a specified percentage and to select the ClearType level.

The contrast determines the darkness of text, from 0 for no enhancements to 100%. The default setting is set to 50% on most systems.

Similar options are available for the ClearType level. A value of 0 would mean that ClearType is disabled while 100% would mean it is fully enabled.

Testing

If you have an eye for detail you probably do not need visual aids to see which font rendering settings display the clearest fonts in Firefox. Everyone else may want to take screenshots, with a 100% quality setting, to compare the different font rendering modes effectively.

You can use the built-in print screen functionality for that, or a scree capturing software like Screenpresso, PicPick or Ashampoo Snap.

It may also help to ask someone standing by to take a look to get a second opinion. Then again, if you have to work on the computer it is probably best if you make the final decision.

Anti-Aliasing Tuner can be downloaded from the Mozilla Firefox add-on repository. (via Caschy)

In this article I will remind you how to install fonts the “old school” way (although it’s not really that old school) and I will also show you how to install fonts in the “new school” way.

Old school

Before I get to the old school method, I thought it might be good to list out a few of my favorite places to get fonts. Since I used to do a lot of graphics and web design, fonts were a very important tool for me. For those fonts, some of my favorite stops were:

Chank: One of the coolest collections of artistic fonts you will ever see. NOTE: Most of these fonts are paid-for, not free.

Urban Fonts: A great collection of free fonts.

1001 Fonts: A generous collection of free fonts.

Font Freak: Not a bad collection.

Okay, now that you have collected a thousand or so free fonts ;-), it’s time to “install” them. This is very simple. What you need to do is create a folder called ~/.fonts. Before you create this, make sure it doesn’t already exist. You can create this folder with the command mkdir ~/.fonts. Once that folder is created it’s time to add the fonts. So all of those *ttf fonts you downloaded…move them into the new directory. Say all of your .ttf fonts are in the ~/Downloads directory. You can move them with this command:

mv ~/Downloads/*ttf ~/.fonts

Now if you log out and log back in, your desktop and applications will have full access to those fonts. Now, let’s take a look at the new school Ubuntu method.

New school

Figure 1

This is a very welcome feature for any Linux distribution. If you open up the Ubuntu Software Center you will notice, on the home page, a Fonts section (see Figure 1). If you click on that section you will see a very large selection of fonts that you can install. These range from various languages, to an installer for the  Microsoft Core Fonts, to a nice collection of artistic fonts. If you are looking for a specific font for a specific language, you’re in luck. In this section you will find numerous different languages represented.

To install all you do is select and entry and then click the Install button. You can also get more information about the selection by clicking the More Info button. Unfortunately you do not get a sample of the font from the more information button, but in some cases you do get a nice description of said selection.

After you have installed your new fonts, it’s always best to log in and log out to ensure those fonts are available for all applications.

Final thoughts

Installing fonts has never been easier in Linux. Thanks to Ubuntu and the Ubuntu Software Center, anyone can install fonts on their Linux machine.

In this article I am going to introduce you to Fonty Python. Fonty Python isn’t just a cool name, it’s a tool that allows you to manage your fonts in a rather different manner. Fonty Python allows you to organize your collection of fonts in sub-collections called Pogs (for TyPOGraphy). In this article you will learn how to install and manage your fonts with FontyP ython. Bring out your fonts!

Installation

If you are using Ubuntu you will happy to know you can find Fonty Python in either Synaptic or the Ubuntu Software Center. Do a search for “fonty” (no quotes) and install the results. If you aren’t running Ubuntu, you can install from source by following these steps:

1. Make sure you have the requirements installed: python2.4 (up to python2.6, but not python3), python-dev, python-imaging, python-wxgtk2.6 (or greater).
2. Download the tar file from the download page.
3. Open up a terminal window.
4. Unpack the tar file with the command tar xvzf fontypython-XXX.tar.gz Where XXX is the release number.
5. Change into the newly created directory with the command cd fontypython-XXX Where XXX is the release number.
6. Issue the command python setup.py install.

The result will be the fontypython command installed successfully.

Using Fonty Python

Figure 1

You will find the Fonty Python executable in the Graphics sub-menu of your Applications menu. When you first fire up Fonty Python you will see the main window (see Figure 1), which will contain no fonts. If you are like me, you keep your fonts in the ~/.fonts directory. The problem is, Fonty Python will not look in hidden directories. To get around this you need to create a symbolic link in your home directory so that Fonty Python can see your fonts. Open up that terminal window again and issue the following command:

ln -s ~/.fonts ~/fonts

Now when you open up Fonty Python it will be able to see your fonts. What you want to do is double click the fonts directory in the left-most pane. This will reveal your fonts in the middle pane. At first you might think you’re not seeing your entire collection. If you notice there is a drop-down with a number and a Forward button. If you click the drop-down you will see that Fonty Python places fonts on pages, so you’re not having to scroll through thousands of fonts in one pane. You can also click the Forward button to move through your font collection, one page at a time.

Creating Pogs

Notice in Figure 1 I have three Pogs created: Handwriting, Messy Fonts, and Typwriter. As you can imagine I am in the process of organizing my fonts. For my organizational needs I am creating a Pog for each font look. That way all I have to do is select a Pog by look and search the fonts associated with that Pog.

To create a Pog click the New Pog button and give your Pog a name. Once named that Pog will be listed in the Target Pogs pane. To add fonts to that Pog follow these steps:

1. Select the Pog you want to add fonts to.
2. Go through your installed fonts one page at a time and select fonts to be included.
3. Before you move to a new page click the “Put fonts into XXX” button (Where XXX is the name of the Pog).

Continue until you have added all related fonts into your Pog. Don’t worry if you forget a font, because you can always add more fonts to your Pogs any time.

Final thoughts

Now that you have all of your fonts organized, it will be much easier to find, organize, and view the fonts you have installed on your machine.

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.

With The GIMP, creating rudimentary 3D logos is painless…if you know the steps. And with a good collection of fonts you can make your clients think you have far more skills than you might actually have. With that in mind, let’s take a look and see just how simple it is to create a 3D logo with The GIMP.

How it works

The GIMP has a built in feature that helps you to create these logos. We will be working with version 2.6 – which is actually important because the engine that creates these has changed as well as the location of the submenu has changed. So if you don’t have 2.6, give upgrading a go.

The process is pretty simple.

• Select the type of logo you want to create from the Create menu.
• Enter all of the necessary information and select the configurations to suit your needs.
• Click OK
• Edit the image to suit your needs.
• Save the file.

Now let’s take a look at the process with a bit more detail.

The logo tool

Figure 1

To open up the logo tool go to the File menu and select the Create submenu. From with the Create submenu you will see the Logos submenu, click on that to reveal the different types of logos you can create (see Figure 1).

The different types of logos range from the cartoonish, to the professional, to the nearly-fantastical. There are quite a few choices so your best bet is to play around with them until you find the type of logo you prefer to work with.

Figure 2

Once you click on the logo type you want to create a new window will open. It is within this window that the logo is created. The good news is, you really need zero artistic skills to tackle this task.

Figure 2 shows all of the configuration options you will have to deal with to create a logo. Don’t let amount of options fool you, you really only need to work with a minimum of these to create your logo. Here’s what you’ll need to work with:

Text: This is what your logo will say.

Font: This is the font you want to use for your logo.

Blend Gradient(s): These will be the gradient colors you will use for your logo. You can create new gradients as well. The included gradients should be plenty to get you started.

Background Color: If you know the color of the background your logo will be going over you can change this here. I usually delete the background color so the logo is surrounded by a transparent border.

Figure 3

And that is the bare minimum you need. Once you have all of that filled out, click OK and the logo will be created.

Figure 3 shows a sample logo created using the Glossy logo tool, the Biometric Joe font,  and the Cold Steel 2 gradient.

Of course there are plenty more options to configure for your logo – but getting the hang of the basics will give you plenty to do with this tool.

Figure 4

TIP: As I mentioned I tend to remove the background in this logos. What this does is allow my logos to be placed on any color background. To do this go to the layer window of your new logo, select the background layer, and click the delete button in the layer window. When you save this image you will now want to make sure you save it in a format that supports transparency (such as .gif or .png.)

Final thoughts

I have used this method to create logos for plenty of clients. Not only does this make you a more versatile web designer, it also adds to the bottom line as you can now charge design fees.

The font manager provides quick access to many useful features including the installation and uninstallation of fonts, copying and moving fonts or taking a look at a character map of that font. It makes use of an internal charmap but can also display the charmap of the operating system.

Fonts can be searched which becomes useful when working with font collections that consists of hundreds of different fonts. They can also be printed, saved as an image or renamed from the main interface.

Additional options include the search for duplicate fonts and the creation of backups before installing or uninstalling fonts. NexusFont is a great font manager for the Windows operating system. The only feature that it is lacking is to filter the Windows system fonts from the display to make it easier to distinguish between them and third party fonts.

You don’t only get one font weight with only a few extra characters. You get the full deal, with different font weights, characters, and in some cases all characters have a unique shape (Delicious font). There are also some nice descriptions, which make me realize how hard font design must be. Apparently “The Delicious italic is not a slanted roman, but a true italic.”… No comment from me, I have no idea what he’s talking about, but the font looks awesome!

My favorite one is Museo and Diavolo. I love the elegance that the narrow Museo offers, especially in its thinner variants. Diavolo is probably one of the coolest fonts I’ve ever seen. Put a bold heading on any page in Diavolo and the font itself makes a statement instantly. My only problem is now that I can’t use these fonts in my web pages because few people have them, let’s hope css3 changes this and enables embedding of fonts properly. Anyway, these fonts are awesome, check them out and download them right now!

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)

It is easy to scroll through all installed fonts by selecting the first font in the list and using the mouse-wheel to move to the next one. Even better is the option to create a html file with previews for all installed system fonts. It is up to the user to customize the display by selecting the display text, size and attributes for each font.

A font can be uninstalled by right-clicking it in the fonts list and selecting Uninstall from the menu. Two options are available. The first will create a backup while the second will remove the font from the system without a backup. Users should make sure that they do not remove system fonts from the system to avoid problems that can arise from that.

It is also possible to move or copy fonts using the same context menu of the fonts browser. Fonts can also be previewed by using the file browser which is an explorer like interface that can be used to check the fonts of a selected directory. The font manager will automatically check if a font is installed on the system and inform the user if that is the case. Fonts can be installed by right-clicking them and selecting the Install option from the menu.

This is a great way of previewing many fonts in short time and installing those that pass the preview. The font manager is compatible to all NT operating systems, no word on 64-bit edition support though.

Click Font is a small Open Source application that provides users with a better way to install fonts in Windows. The software adds an Install Font entry to the right-click menu when specific font related file extensions are selected.

The software can install True Type, Open Type and Postscript Fonts and register them correctly on the system. One nice feature is the option to install all fonts that are located in a specific folder which can be real time saver.

Click Font is compatible to 32-bit versions of Windows 2000, NT and Windows XP but should run under Windows Vista as well.

A better use of a software that displays all fonts installed on the system is the overview to be able to pick only quickly for a presentation, letter or other purpose. Or could you name the differences between Arial, Times New Roman and Franklin Gothic Medium out of your head ? You could obviously just test them in the application that you write the text with but this usually takes way longer.

Hawkeye Font Browser is a free software for Microsoft Windows that requires the .net Framework 1.1. It’s a tiny 39 Kilobyte application that can be run from any location and immediately displays a sentence in all fonts installed on the system.

The user can enter a different sentence and pick a font size, color and select bold or underline letters. By the way, if you have more than 100 fonts installed on your system you might want to consider reducing them to speed up system boot times. Check out the article fonts increase system startup for additional information.

Sizlopedia discovered a web service called What The Font that can identify the font that has been used in a particular image. Images can either be uploaded to the service or directly from a website. The image that has been uploaded to the server is then analyzed automatically and the user is asked for verification after that process.

Each font char is identified separately and the user can correct or add chars that have not been identified properly. The whole process, from uploading to analysis and manual correction does not take longer than a few seconds.

The matches that have been found are displayed on the next and final page. The original image is floating on top of the page scrolling with the site to speed up the comparison and final identification.

The thing that’s bothering me a little bit is that all fonts on that website are sold which means that you cannot download the font immediately. It’s still nice for identification purposes.

New fonts can be nice for local websites or documents as well but I honestly was never a huge fan of that. Still, if you are looking for new fonts you should definitely take the time to visit the Font Cubes website which hosts an extensive font collection. Font cubes is a non-commercial website which does not mix free and commercial fonts like so many other font websites do.

A special feature is that the font is shown in its complete form and not only partially which is great if you are looking for a font that does have a specific char. Fonts are rated and the website offers several ways of listing fonts for the users. It is for instance possible to take a look at the most popular fonts, the highest rated fonts or the most downloaded fonts of the day.

Instructions on how to download and install the fonts are available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

You can basically do two things at FontStruct. The first and probably most exciting function is to create your own font set and share it with other users on the website and Internet. I really thought I would never say that but it’s actually fun to create your own font. Besides that it’s easy as pie to do it. You can select a letter set at the bottom, say Latin, Greek, Arabic or Hebrew and work your way through the letters, numbers and special characters until you are finished. You can always take a look at the results so far and correct any mistake that you might have made.

It does take some time if you consider that you have to create more than 80 characters for the Basic Latin font set alone but as I said it is well worth it and fun. A set of tools is available that should be known from image editors, you can copy and erase pixels, draw lines or rectangles and use special shaped pixels that are available in the left pane.

The second great function is the ability to share and download fonts from the website. Since the website is more or less unknown only 46 fonts are available right now, some of them however are fantastic. The website offers the typical community based functions like commenting and rating fonts or user avatars.

FontStruct is great fun combined with great value, what else could you want ?

The free Powerpoint Viewer 2007 is installing several Windows Vista system fonts during installation which stay on the system even if the software is uninstalled afterwards. The cleartype fonts Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantia and Corbel are installed into the fonts directory of the Windows XP installation.

You can change the font that Windows is using in the Appearance tab of the Display Properties. Just click on the Advanced button in that menu and select the element that you want to change the font for. You should see an immediate difference if you select one of the new fonts and have cleartype enabled.

Users who use a custom design have to take care that the new font does not break the design. It could take some time until you get it right.

Fonts500 is a website that claims to have 500 of the best fonts available. The good part about this is that all of these are free for your use. An initial visit to the page displays the first 100 fonts, with links to the other 400 at the bottom of the page.

The fonts are displayed such that each font’s name is written in that font itself. If you want, you can use custom text to view how the same text looks in different fonts. The fonts themselves are varied and interesting. Some of them actually tempted me to download and add to my font collection.

Each font can be downloaded in a zip file. Then, you can extract it to the Fonts directory in your Control Panel. If you want all the fonts, I suggest you use the Downthemall Firefox extension. All 500 fonts together come to only 26 Mb.

It is important to remember that too many fonts can slow your computer down. However, it’s still worth checking out all the different fonts available.

Are you satisfied with the standard Windows fonts or are you always on the lookout for unique fonts to add to your collection? Where do you go when you want good fonts? Do you know of any other sites offering free fonts?

It therefore would be good to pick those fonts that you want (need) and those which you do not which would have the effect that you would still have all the fonts you work with normally and experience a faster system at the same time. Also, if you’re into fonts and use many variations of them for your work / hobby purposes, you may appreciate a great source of free fonts I’d like to mention underneath.

Font Frenzy is a great tool for font management available as a free download. This application consists of 4 parts allowing you to put your fonts in order. DeFrenzy backs up all additional fonts to a specified directory and erases them from the font folder so that it in fact restores the default state after Windows installation.

FrenzySnap cooperates with DeFrenzy by first allowing you to make a snapshot of currently used fonts and return to that state using DeFrenzy later on. ReFrenzy provides you a simple way to restore previously saved fonts from your back-ups. Last but not least, FrenzyMan allows you to manage each single font individually meaning that you can check one or more of them and then execute certain actions like Adding/Erasing, Loading/Unloading and so on. The last advantage of this lovely tool is that you can simply change the text working as a preview for installed fonts along with its size.

Besides managing or deleting fonts from your system, you might also want to choose some beautiful ones and add them into your system using the previously described utility. Fawnt.com offers hundreds of high quality fonts for free. It lets you preview the fonts, rate them, use custom preview text, check the package content details and download it free of charge. You can find some pretty bizarre pieces here.

You need to take a look at the link “10000 more fonts” at the bottom of the page after you are finished looking at the picks on the main page. This link is well worth it.

A quick recap: Fonts slow down system startup. The difference between 1000 and 100 installed fonts is almost 25 seconds which is huge. Windows XP installs 44 fonts and all other fonts are added by other applications such as Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop and Gimp.

Besides offering the ability to remove all non system fonts in Windows XP which is called DeFrenzy in Font Frenzy it offers the functionality to make a snapshot of your current fonts and backup them.

The so called FrenzyMan is a font manager which displays all fonts in a list giving the user options to install, delete, add new, unload and view the selected fonts. What I really like about Font Frenzy is that it does not need to be installed and can be run from any location on your hard drive.