More Fonts and More About Fonts

As you'll recall from Tip 36, Adding Fonts to the BeOS, to be a real BeOS Power User, you've gotta have more fonts. That Tip had sources for a bunch of funky, interesting fonts. This week we're looking at a source for fonts that, while possible somewhat boring, are probably more generally useful.

The reason these fonts are more boring is that they are less visually distinctive. They are straight-ahead, ordinary fonts, the kind you probably see every day, but don't think about. They are more useful for two reasons. First, they're just more legible. You can actually use and look at these fonts for hours without getting a headache. You probably can't say that about fonts you get from Chank.

The second reason is much more interesting. NetPositive 2.0 will respect the <FONT FACE="your,fonts,here"> HTML tag, which will mean that you can see web pages that use non-default fonts the way their authors and designers intended them to look. Or, at least you could, if you had those fonts installed. So, we turn to the source for the most commonly specified fonts on the Web:

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fontpack/

That's right, you can get from Microsoft free copies of various fonts that designers are commonly specifying, including Ariel, probably the most popular sans serif font on the Web these days.

Getting these fonts into the BeOS requires some cleverness, as they are quite understandably packaged in Windows-savvy archives, which are not terribly useful on the BeOS. You should download your chosen font using the Windows 3.1 & Windows 3.1.1 format link. These fonts will download as a file with an .exe file extension, meaning they are self-extracting archives -- under Windows 3.1.x. With the changes you made following last week's Tip, Expanding Expander's Horizons, though, you can drag these archives onto Expander, and expand them just like regular zip archives.

Unfortunately, the archives that would be most useful, those for Arial, Times New Roman, and Courier, are not available in Windows 3.1.x format (I guess that's Microsoft's way of telling you to upgrade ;-). To get these onto your system, you'll need to download them using your other operating system (Windows or Mac OS), expand the archive there, and then boot into the BeOS, mount your other operating systems volume, and copy the fonts to your BeOS volume.

Note that to get the fonts into a format you can use with the BeOS, you may need to install them (the Windows archives are installers), or in the case of the Mac OS version, convert them to Windows TrueType format using the TTConverter utility included in the MacUtilities folder of the Mac OS partition of your BeOS Installer CD.

And that's this week's lesson on how to be a BeOS Power User!