As we always say, fonts are a great way to improve the effectiveness of your presentation. Each of them has its own personality and speaks with a different voice.
So, let’s say that you started the journey — you read our post in which we showed you where you can find and download incredible fonts for your presentations. And you already found a font which, you believe, is the best fit for your next talk. Then a new challenge has appeared — how do you make it work? How do you install the new font?
Well, installing a font, both on PC and Mac, is a super simple task. Once you download the font (or you are just provided with it via email or some other way), what you will have is a file with .zip, .ttf or a .otf extension. If you are seeing a .zip file, then your first step is to unzip it.
Now, let us tell you something you need to know about fonts — they have families.
We think by default that one font means one file. But if you start thinking further, fonts have different styles — bold, italic, bold and italic and even more options. All of them are part of the so-called “font-family” but each of them is a separate file. Anyway, beware of confusion! “One font” could mean “one font family with many styles”.
So, don’t wonder if you open the unzipped folder with your new font and there are many files in it. In such case, do the following steps after you select all files to install them at once.
Installing on PC
Choose one of the two simple ways:
First way
1.Right mouse click on the font file
2.Hit the Install button.
Second way
1. Open the Fonts folder in Control Panel
2. Just copy -> paste the font file in there.
Note that:
- When you have already installed a font, but you’ve forgotten, Windows will show a pop-up message. Don’t panic! It just asks you whether to overwrite the file or ignore the new one. Whatever you choose, you can click on “Do this for all current items” checkbox so that it won’t ask you for each such font separately.
- Make sure that when you install a new font, all the Microsoft Office programs are closed. Otherwise, you need to restart them, so they can recognize that a new font has been installed.
- If a font is not recognized even after the installation, this could be due to the font file format. OTF and TTF are the most common formats. OTF is the newer and better choice, but if your machine is a bit older, it might need a TTF version of the font. Try to search it on the web!
If this doesn’t fix the problem, you can write us and we’ll try to help you.
Installing on MAC
1. Go to the Font Book
2. Choose the Add Fonts button from the File Menu
3. Locate the font and click Open
.otf or .ttf?
For those of you who wonder what the difference between .ttf and .otf file formats is, read this short resume.
The most significant differences are in the way they are created, in the technical part. In a history point of view, .otf is the new standard and was developed after .ttf format. That’s why there are situations when an old computer has problems with .otf and works better with .ttf. But the two formats should work perfectly well on both Mac and PC.
However, if you ever have one font in both formats, go for the .otf one. It might have more typographic features, better language support, more glyphs (characters) and other advantages.
Now you are ready to empower the message of your next presentation with the right font. Find, install and use new fonts! And in case you want to try out more than one font, check out our article where we share a very nifty technique how to install multiple fonts with just one click.
Originally published at 356labs.com on January 7, 2019.
