Fonts & Encodings

Chapter 7. Font Management under Windows

Our concern in this chapter will be the installation and management of fonts under Windows 2000 and XP. These procedures are similar in many ways to their Macintosh counterparts, for several reasons: most of the most common software packages, be they for office automation or artistic design, have been ported from one platform to the other (from Windows to the Macintosh, in the case of office automation; from the Macintosh to Windows, in the case of desktop publishing and the graphic arts). Why should the same not apply to ancillary resources—in particular, fonts?

Figure 7-1. The Fonts directory in Windows XP.

Installing fonts under Windows is as easy as installing them under Mac OS: one need only go into the Control Panel and open the shortcut to the Fonts directory, which, in fact, points to the directory c:\winnt\fonts, where all the fonts are stored. In Figure 7-1, we see a screenshot of this directory under Windows XP. It is a very special type of directory, as the names of the icons are not filenames but rather the names of fonts in Windows.

Among the icons seen in that window, several are marked with a red uppercase letter 'A'. These are bitmap fonts (with the extension .fon). In some cases (such as the Modern, Roman, and Script fonts), they may be vector fonts in an arcane format called vector fonts that is as old as the hills. ...