Organise your fonts and create new ones

Nick Peers reveals how to manage your font collection as well as design new typefaces from scratch using a collection of open source tools.

- Nick Peers

OUR EXPERT

Nick Peers was surprised to discover his handwriting is still semi-legible after decades sat at a keyboard.

Fonts play a crucial role in everyday life, whether you're designing a newsletter, writing a letter or simply pootling around your desktop. However, with so many installed on your PC (and still you can't find the right one), how do you go about maximising your use of them?

Let's start with a quick primer. Fonts exist in a three-level hierarchy. At the bottom are the individual characters, also known as glyphs. Whether letters, numbers or symbols, glyphs share a consistent design and are grouped together into individual fonts or typefaces. Different styles of glyph - such as bold, italics or underline - exist within their own font, and these related typefaces are then grouped together into font families.

Typefaces are primarily one of two types: sans serif and serif. Serif fonts include traditional flourishes like small lines or strokes found at the end of longer strokes in letters - examples include the ubiquitous Times New Roman. As the name implies, sans serif fonts lack these flourishes, as seen in a typeface like Arial.

Fonts can also be divided into proportional and monospace fonts, which refers to the widths of each glyph. Monospace fonts apply equal widths to each glyph - they're suited to applications where consistent widths are helpful, such as when displaying code or being used in the Terminal. Proportional fonts enable for example the letter 'i' and 'b' to take up less width than 'w', resulting in more attractive-looking and readable text.

Complicating things further is the lack of a single, universal file format for fonts. Thankfully, Ubuntu supports the major standards, including .ttf (True Type) and .otf (OpenType).