Coronado Eagle, Volume 7, Number 19, 8 May 1996 — Bits and Bytes [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Bits and Bytes

Dick Chilcott

Q: “Any ideas on how to spruce up some drab documents?” A: There are lots of ways. I guess that you do not mean inserting just pictures and the like. Try some new fonts. I picked up a CD that has some 1,250 fonts on it. I had gotten a shareware program called

Font Monster and used it to print out catalogs of all the fonts. What an array of goodies. Fonts that look like handwritten script, one that has holes that make it look like Swiss cheese (not too easy to read though), all sorts of special characters, musical notes, bar codes, the special bank printing codes, etc., etc., etc. The Font Monster is in and of itself interesting. I had gotten it by downloading it from America Online. It dutifully asked for a registration fee. I thought that it would be good to use and sent the money to Texas. Two days later I got email from the author who lives in Taiwan. He gave me the info to

register. It consisted of my name and a numeric code. I typed it in. Error! I retyped it exactly the way it was in the e-mail, complete with the missing period. Success! The numeric code and the names were somehow tied together. Pretty neat. It is really helpful to keep the fonts organized into groups that you set up. You then can recover them and load them up when you need them. One thing to be careful of is that too many fonts may make your documents look like a ransom note using words cut from the newspaper. Pick one and stay with it. Use the unusual fonts for emphasis. Until next time