Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
I am all kinds of excited because several cool things are happening.
First of all, I have just complete our new website which has been a monumental task.
Secondly, I've been setting up a new demo station which this is the first time that
I'm recording at it and now for the first time in the history of DottoTech, I have the
ability to deliver demos in both Windows and Mac.
“Oh my gosh,’ you’re saying, “Can it be true?”
I believe it is.
So what’s my first hybrid demo, Windows and Mac?
We’re going to be talking about fonts today because as I was setting up my website, I
needed to first of all figure out what font the theme that I was using used.
Of course, if I’d read the documentation, I could have done it but there’s got to
be a technology way to do it, does there not?
Indeed, I will show that to you.
Then I'm going to talk about installing fonts.
I haven’t done it for ages.
So installing fonts in both Windows and Mac, that’s all today on DottoTech.
Well, I'm going to apologize for possibly the longest introduction in the history of
the show.
Actually, that’s not true because I often ramble a lot in the beginning but here you
see beside me now my new website that I've been working on for quite some time.
Please drop in and visit DottoTech.com but be kind.
We are still working our way through a few of the teething problems.
But as you can see, it’s a significant upgrade compared to what the site used to look like.
It’s using a technology called Parallex, very cool.
I will talk about it in a future episode of DottoTech.
But here was the challenge that I faced.
I needed to figure out what font it was in.
Of course, if I’d gone in and read the documentation, I would have now figured that out but I thought
there’s got to be kind of a technology to find out what font is on a page, especially
if you visit a website and you say that’s a font that I like.
How do I figure out what font that is?
Well, there’s a tool for Chrome, a Chrome plug-in tool called WhatFont.
I installed it in my browser and it installs as a browser extension and went to my website.
What happens is it’s like a toggle, this tool.
You click on it and turn it on.
You know that it’s turned on if you see the exit sign telling you to exit.
What happens actually if you normally visit a site when it’s installed, it doesn’t
have any action at all.
But when you turn on WhatFont, as you move your cursor on the page whatever you’re
hovering over, it tells you what font you are seeing.
In this particular case, it’s Railway.
Now I should warn you that it doesn’t seem to work on every site but it works on a lot
of sites so it’s not a perfect tool but it is a great option for discovering and finding
fancy new fonts.
If you see a font on a friend’s site or you visit a site that you really like, you
can take a look and see if you can discover the name.
Now once you’ve discovered the name, a lot of these fonts are free fonts available for
us to download.
Because it’s in the theme, in this particular case my WordPress theme, it doesn’t necessarily
mean that I have access to it if I'm say working in Photoshop.
So I want to download it into my computer so I can use it myself in creating additional
graphics that will fit nicely into the overall look of the site.
So I did a quick search on the internet and found at FontSquirrel the Railway font, which
is a Google font.
It’s free to download so all I did was I clicked on download the ttf file, which is
the format for a font file.
I downloaded that, saved it into my Download directory, which I will do right now and then
I will show you exactly how you install it.
So it’s downloading the file as we speak right now.
Now once it’s downloaded, it comes as a zipped file.
If we open it up, all of the different versions of the typeface are available to us in this
zipped file.
And then installing it on a Mac couldn’t be easier.
Select the faces that you want to install, right-click your mouse and then choose Open
with.
It’s going to open it automatically with FontBook.
FontBook will allow you to install the font.
You just click on Install and then it’s available to you in all of your desktop applications.
Could not be easier.
It’s a very fulfilling process, to be perfectly honest.
Now I have Railway installed so I can create my own graphics using the Railway font.
Well done.
But what about the Windows world, Steve?
You said you were going to show it to us on Windows.
Well, let us zip over to my virtual Windows install running here on my Mac.
I have Windows 10 running here.
Here if we take a look in the Chrome browser in Windows 10, we can see we have access to
the exact same Chrome plug-in.
We can plug this into our Chrome installed in Windows 10 and we are ready to roll.
Once we’ve done that, you can download the exact same font.
This font format is the same be it Windows or Mac.
You will get a zipped file that you can unzip.
Once you’ve unzipped that file, you can simply double-click on the file and just like
on the Mac, up will come the ability to install it.
It does it automatically.
So we click on Install and now it’s installing this face of the Railway font.
I want to do it with all of the different faces.
I want to install it all on the operating system.
If you’re unsure and you want to check on your fonts, you just go in the search bar
here and you type in “font” and you can take a look at the font control panel and
you can view all of your different installed fonts by clicking there.
Sorry, I had to re-record this final section of this video because we had an audio issue.
So as I was saying moments ago, if you want to check to make sure that the font is properly
installed, you open the control panel and here you can manage all of your fonts.
If you just type in “Railway,” we can see that the Railway Black which I just installed
is now installed.
Of course, we will install the whole family.
But it’s just that easy to upgrade your system, increase the number of fonts you have
and basically enrich your graphics applications because now you have access to more fonts.
But use them judiciously, folks.
Do not make all if your documents look like ransom notes by using every font available
to you.
Well, I hope you found this video today to be useful.
There are three ways to stay in touch with us here on DottoTech.
The first is please subscribe to this channel.
Second is subscribe to our newsletter.
Then you’ll hear about our upcoming live events and webinars which we do many of.
And finally, DottoTech is a community-funded site supported through the generosity of you
through the crowd-funding site, Patreon.
If you would be so kind as to drop by our Patreon page, have a look and see what’s
involved in in supporting DottoTech, what we do with your money and what perks are available
to you, I would appreciate it.
The perks are awesome.
Till next time, I am Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!