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Typography 500

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Quick tips on using fonts

The above list describes the types of fonts in each group and the normal way they would be used. The real tests of using fonts in a document are;

  • Can the text be easily read? If in doubt ask someone else.
  • Does the overall design look good? Again ask someone else to look at it.
  • Are the fonts used appropriate? Using a fun decorative font on a legal document may not be a good idea!
  • Is the heading font appropriate? Try using a different weight of the font used for the body.
  • Not sure about the design? Leave it and go and do something else for a couple of hours, then come back to it. Does it still look right?

Don't forget it is often worth playing with fonts just to see the result. There are many rules of typography, designers spend years at university studying them, then spend a lifetime learning how to break them!

EuroSymbols

In the Symbolic font group is a font family called EuroSymbol. This contains a number of weights of special EuroSymbol fonts. These fonts only contain the EuroSymbol (mapped to $ , E and ยค characters). There are three main versions of the EuroSymbol fonts, Mono, Sans and Serif. The Sans weights contain the 'real' design of the EuroSymbol, the others contain versions of the EuroSymbol suited to that particular type of font. For example, if you were using a serif font and wanted a Euro character, ensure that the Symbolic font group is turned on, change font to "EuroSymbol.Serif". Type $ (Shift 4), and a EuroSymbol will appear. Now change back to your original font and continue to type. If you make a lot of use of the EuroSymbol it may be worth installing just these fonts to your harddisk using the IFONTVIEW application.

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