Working with Fonts

Everything you type appears in a font, or typeface, a particular design set of letters, numbers, and other characters. The height of characters in a font is measured in points, each point being approximately 1/72 inch, while the width is measured by pitch, which refers to how many characters can fit in an inch. You might have heard common font names, such as Times New Roman, Arial, Courier, or Symbol. Windows comes with a variety of fonts for displaying text and printing documents. Using the Fonts window, you can view these fonts, see a sample of how a font appears when printed, and even install new fonts.

View or Install Fonts

Click the Start button, click Control Panel, and then double-click the Fonts icon in Classic view.

The currently installed fonts on your computer appears in the Fonts window.

Click the File menu, and then click Install New Font.

  • To quickly display the menu bar, press the Alt key.

Navigate to the drive and folder containing the font you want to install.

Select the font. To select more than one font, hold down the Ctrl key while you click each font.

Click OK.

Click the Close button.

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See Also

See “Formatting Text” on page 34 for information on using fonts.


Frequently Asked Questions: What’s the Difference Between the Fonts?

Everything you type appears in a font, a particular typeface design and size for letters, numbers, and other characters. Usually, each typeface, such as Times New Roman, is made available in four variations: normal, bold, italic, and bold italic. There are two basic types of fonts: scalable and bitmapped. A scalable font (also known as outline font) is based on a mathematical equation that creates character outlines to form letters and numbers of any size. The two major scalable fonts are Adobe’s Type 1 PostScript and Apple/Microsoft’s TrueType or OpenType. Scalable fonts are generated in any point size on the fly and require only four variations for each typeface. A bitmapped font consists of a set of dot patterns for each letter and number in a typeface for a specified type size. Bitmapped fonts are created or prepackaged ahead of time and require four variations for each point size used in each typeface. Although a bitmapped font designed for a particular font size will always look the best, scalable fonts eliminate storing hundreds of different sizes of fonts on a disk.


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