| 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, compare them to each other, see a sample of how a font appears when printed, and even install new fonts. Install a Font -
| | Click the Start button, click Control Panel, and then double-click the Fonts icon in Classic view. | -
| | Click the File menu, and then click Install New Font. | -
| | 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. | -
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See Also See " Formatting Text " on page 32 for information on using fonts. | Display Related Fonts -
| | Click the Start button, click Control Panel, and then double-click the Fonts icon in Classic view. | -
| | Click the Similarity button on the toolbar. | -
| | Click the List Fonts By Similarity To list arrow, and then click the font in which you want to display similar fonts. | -
| | Double-click the font name to display a sample sheet of the font, and then click Done. | -
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. | |