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Applying Fonts

Overview

Both Mac OS X and Windows XP offers multiple ways to select and apply fonts to text within documents and projects. They also offer ways to insert special characters and symbols that are not found on the keyboard.

Mac OS X

OS X offers two ways to select and apply fonts within applications:

  • Fonts palette
  • Character palette

Font Palette

The Fonts palette not only allows you to select the proper font, but you can also select its color, the background color, and even shadow details (opacity, blur, offset, angle).

font-panel-panther.gif

The Fonts palette even comes with a Typography palette for controlling a myriad of font details like ligatures, ornaments, glyph variants, old style numbers, and more.

typograpy.gif

Although the Fonts palette will automatically group fonts into their faces (Bold, italic, Normal, etc.), it is only available in Cocoa applications. This means that Carbon applications have no built-in way to group fonts (Carbon application developers will have to program that into their application as a custom feature, which usually leads to inconsistent interfaces). Otherwise, font faces are organized alphabetically, which increases the length of your fonts list dramatically, and occasionally splits up faces that should be grouped together. For instance:

  • Courier Bold
  • Courier New Bold
  • Courier New Bold Italic
  • Courier New Italic
  • Courier New Regular
  • Courier Regular

Courier Bold and Courier Regular are both part of the Courier family, but are split up by Courier New (you can witness this issue in iMovie).


The Fonts Palette allows users to edit how sizes are picked.

Character Palette

For more exotic characters (dingbats, etc.), use the Character palette. The Character palette can also be used to type other (non-Roman) character sets, such as Japanese, Chinese, Cyrillic, Tibetan, and much more.

You can access the Character Palette from within most applications by going to Edit > Special Characters. The palette is rather advanced:

character-palette-e.gif
How many letter E's are there?


Kanji Numerals: Guess which number this is?

character-palette3.gif
Use the Character Palette to insert items such as greek symbols into your documents

Windows XP

XP offers two ways to select and apply fonts within applications:

  • Font panel
  • Character map

Font panel

Windows XP offers a standard font panel to view the fonts on your system from within applications. Applications on XP such as WordPad use this font panel to preview your font selections.


Accessing XP's font panel inside WordPad

XP places icons next to each font to denote what type of font it is (True Type, OpenType, etc), which is a nice touch.

Character Map

XP offers the Character Map to view all of the characters associated with a font along with more exotic characters (dingbats, etc.). Character Map will show you the keyboard shortcut for the currently selected character or symbol in the bottom left-hand corner of the window. Use this keyboard shortcut to type a particular character or symbol in a document without having to copy it out of the Character Palette.

Character Map Basic View
Windows XP Character Map (basic mode)

Character Map Advanced Options
Checking the "Advanced View" box offers you additional options

Conclusion

Flexibility

OS X's multiple font locations allow you to do some pretty nice things. For instance, a design studio could place all their fonts on a central OS X server, and all their workstations would instantly share all the fonts. Or, a lab using networked Home folders would enable users to have access to their personal fonts on any computer in the lab. XP cannot do either of these things.

Ease of Use

OS X's multiple font locations could lead to duplicate fonts, particularly of system fonts. Apple's resolution is to place a bullet next to duplicate/system fonts in Font Book. If you see that a font has duplicates, select it, then go to Edit > Resolve Duplicates. All duplicates of that font will be disabled. In addition, if a user wants to install fonts via drag and drop, they must figure out which location (system, home folder, network, etc.) is the ideal place for them.

Since all XP fonts reside in the same location, font duplication is literally impossible. The down side of having all fonts in one location is that individual users will not be able to have their own personal selection of fonts, but that is a flexibility issue.

Mac OS X

  • Fonts palette provides many options, including shadow
  • Control ligatures, ornaments, glyph variants, and more via the Typography palette
  • Character palette provides a multitude of advanced options
  • Multiple font locations allows for greater flexibility
  • Fonts palette only available to Cocoa applications; Carbon applications may split up font faces
  • Multiple font locations can lead to duplicate fonts, which can cause conflicts

Windows XP

  • Fonts panel uses icons to denote the type of each font
  • Character Map displays keyboard shortcut for selected character
  • Font family grouping available to all applications
  • One font location prevents duplicates
  • Few advanced typography options
  • One font location limits flexibility

OS X's superior typography options in combination with its greater flexibility give it the edge over XP.

Mac OS X: 8
Windows XP: 7

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