OK I’ve entitled this post “Using Christmas Fonts” but it’s really just about finding and using extra fonts, rather than sticking to the ones which come with your computer. There are loads out there, 1,000s. Some you have to pay for but there are also a lot of free ones.
Serious Note About Using Christmas Fonts (or any other).
Some sites which give away fonts supply them as “exe” files. They require you to double click on the exe file and give permission for it to be installed on your computer. We do NOT recommend using these sites or using exe files to install a font. There is no need for it and you never know what else it may be installing at the same time.
Finding a Font.
As we have said there are many sites which give away free fonts We like 1001 Free Fonts which has a good search facility and gives a nice preview of the fonts. For our demonstration we did a search for the word Christmas. Don’t forget when searching for things like Christmas font you can also try a bit of lateral thinking. Maybe searching for “Snow” or “Baubles”. The one we found which we thought we’d like to try called Kingthings Christmas. Don’t worry if you add a font and change your mind later, you can always delete it!
To add the font you will need to do a bit of copying and pasting. It’s not as simple as it could be because you can’t paste a zipped file into the font directory so do the following.
- Download the font you want.
- Double click on the zipped folder you have downloaded to open it up (you may need to go to your downloads folder to find it, it depends on your browser). Fig.1.
- Right click on the font file and copy it (only the font file, any other files like txt files in the zip folder can be ignored for now). Fig. 2.
- Right click on your desktop and paste the font there.
- Right click on the font file on the desktop and copy it.
- Open the font fold (“C” then “Windows” then “fonts”), right click and paste the font file in. Fig.3.
Using the New Font.
Once you have added the font to folder it should then become available in any program which uses font. This will include both Word processing programs (Open Office Writer, Microsoft Word etc) plus graphics programs like paint.net, Photoshop and GIMP. To use the font in most of these programs all you need to do it select it from the drop down list.
A Note about copyright.
You should read the terms of the copyright for any fonts you use carefully. Sometimes you will find details on the site you download the file from. Other times there will be a text file in the zip folder. Even though the font you download may be free there are sometimes restrictions on it’s use. Some are personal use only etc.
