Would you like to type an invitation using Old English type or write a letter in cursive writing? Or perhaps you’d like to create an award to give to someone and you want to use a special font to do this? While your computer comes with a lot of fonts sometimes you may lack the perfect font for the task in hand. Luckily you can find free fonts on the internet and add them to your computer so that you can use them for your projects.
The fonts that you can use in programs like Microsoft Word and Outlook are installed on your computer and they are the same fonts that are available in every program that uses fonts. This means that once you install a font on your computer it will be available to all your programs at any time. So, to add more fonts to your computer you need to find the font to use, then you need to download and install it on your computer. Once that is done the font will be available just like all the fonts you already have available. So, here’s how to get more fonts for your computer.
A good site for finding fonts and one that we recommend is Dafont which you can find at www.dafont.com. Here fonts are arranged in a number of different ways. When you first visit the site you will see the most recently added fonts but there are thousands of fonts available here.
One way to search for fonts is to choose them by their type so click Script to see all the Script fonts or click Handwritten to see just those script fonts that are classified as handwritten fonts. Scroll down the page to see what each font looks like. In many cases there are multiple pages of fonts so click a page number at the foot of the screen to move to the next page and so on.
For each font you will see the font’s name shown in the font itself so you can get an idea as to what it looks like. When you find a font that you like locate the Download button for that font to its right. Just above the Download button are the font licensing details – look for fonts that are Free for personal use or 100% Free. Click the font name to see more details about the font. If you like it – click Download to download the font.
At the foot of the Internet Explorer browser window you will see a prompt asking you to Open/Save or Cancel. Click Open to download and open the file all in one step. This is the best option as fonts typically come packaged in a zip file so this process will automatically open the zip file for you and show you its contents.
In the file list locate and click the TrueType font file – in our example it is called DawningofaNewDay.tff. If there is no TrueType font file look for an OpenType font file as that is sometimes used. Double click on this file to open the font dialog. Here you will see the characters in the font and an example of it at various sizes. Click the Install button to install it. You can now close this dialog.
Once installed the font is now permanently on your computer. You can go ahead and download and install additional fonts now if you wish to do so. It is a good idea to make a note of the names of the fonts you have installed so you can find them later. Then, when you are ready to do so, launch a program such as Word and select the font from the font list. You can now type using your newly installed font.
