What fonts are universal?
e.g. if I want to use Arial or Lucida (monospaced) font, will it be there on
all PCs?
If a font is not there will it default to some other similar font with the
same size and style?
How does alll that work?
Do I have to code to see if a font is there then manually change as necessary?
In fonts, I know that TT is truetype but what is O ?
VB6

Arial, Courier New, Symbol, and Times New Roman were all included in Windows
95. Other fonts were added in later versions, like Tahoma, Verdana, and
Lucida xxx. Those 4 may be the only (TrueType) fonts you can be virtually
assured are there.

Never a bad idea.

OpenType.

Here is a list of fonts installed by default on the various version of
Windows from Win95 up to XP. A quick glance on my own system seems to
indicate that most of the XP fonts are installed in Vista, although I'm sure
there is an official Vista list somewhere. If you check the list at the
following link you should be able to find a decent number of fonts that are
common to all Windiws versions that your code is likely to be run on:

http://www.kayskreations.net/fonts/fonttb.html

Size isn't a problem (at least that's what my wife tells me!) but if you're
using VB to set the font name (Me.Font.Name or whatever) and if you supply
the name of a font that is not installed then there isn't much VB (or the
system) can do to select a font with a similar style to the font you
requested because the system will not know what that font looks like or what
its various attributes are. In this case I think VB will just default to
Arial (at least that's what it does on my Vista machine although I seem to
recall one machine I had on which it would simply ignore the request and
remain at whatever font was previously set). However, if you instead use the
CreateFontIndirect API function to select the font you will be able to fill
in some details of the kind of font you want (font name, mono spaced,
proportional, with or without serifs, etc) and if the specific font name you
requested is not available then the system will do its best to select a font
that complies with the various asttributes mentioned. This never seems to
work very well though and you will very often get a font that looks nothing
like the font you had in mind.

In general I think the best thing you could do would be to first test
whether the specific font you want is available (set Font.Name and then read
Font.Name to see if it 'took') and if it is not available then have your
code try another specifically named font from a list of possible aternatives
that you know look similar. If you stick mainly to the fonts in the lists at
the above link then you should be okay.

Otherwise, if you have a specific font that you have on your own machine and
if it is freeware or otherwise has no licence restrictions then you can
package that font with your VB application and then temporarily install it
on the target machine if it does not already exist on that machine. Check
out the AddFontResource and RemoveFontResource API functions.

It's Open Type. A bit like True Type on steriods :-)

Mike

Ah, I forgot about Wingdings in my list of TrueTypes.

  But only available on Windows since Win2000. I received
some OTF files last week and had to find a program to convert
them to TTF. In the process I found that people on Linux
also seem to have trouble with OTF fonts.

Pray tell, what program did you find? Was it free?

   That's weird. I see your post as being posted 40 minutes
earlier than mine, and marked already read!

Here's what I found:
http://www.high-logic.com/fontcreator.html

  The pricing is strange and exorbitant. It's $80 with the
claim that that only entitles you to play with it as a
"home" version. $150 if you want to use it "commercially".

But there's a trial version that works for 30 days in "professional
mode".
Other than that, I haven't found much. And I have no idea
what's involved in the conversion. There is one other
option I found called FontForge:
http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/

   It's free and can apparently do the job. But it's one
of those funky Linux open source programs that requires
all sorts of command-line jumping through hoops to make it
work. It doesn't look like it's worth the trouble.

   After I found FontCreator I thought that maybe I'd
look for some free fonts, to add to my collection and
convert any OTFs while I have the trial version. But from
what I've found so far it seems that there are very few
OTF fonts in use.

Presumably by that you mean fonts which are contained in a file with a .otf
file extension. But there are lots of Open Type fonts that actually live in
a file with a .ttf file extension, and they appear to be quite common,
although perhaps that's only on Vista (I haven't got access to any non Vista
machines at the moment on which I can check it). As I understand it
(although I haven't really looked into it in any detail) there are at least
two 'flavours', those that contain postscript data (or those in the Adobe
Type library) which have a .otf file extension and those that are based on
the True Type font, which still have a .ttf file extension. I know that on
my own Vista machine for example the Fonts applet in Control Panel (which I
assume is the one program on my system that is likely to know most about
these things) tells me that almost all of the fonts on my system, certainly
the vast majority of them, are Open Type fonts. However, when I write code
to dig out their filenames from the Windows registry I can see that all the
files in which they live have a .ttf extension, and MS Word 2007 still
displays the TT icon against them (although MS Word does not display the
Open Type icon against any of the fonts). There is probably (almost
certainly) a way of examining the font (perhaps even an API function that
will do it for you) in order to determine whether it contains Open Type or
not, but I haven't looked into that yet. Here is a link to some Adobe speil
on the subject that I've just Googled for:

http://www.adobe.com/uk/type/opentype/

Mike

   It would be nice if someone knowledgeable could chime in
and explain all of this. I'd never heard of OTF files until I
was sent some this week. I didn't try renaming them to
TTF, but my impression is that OTF is an entirely different
format, so I don't see how they could mix and match extensions.
Maybe there's more than one meaning to "Open Type"? Or maybe
you have both in your font collection?
  What I've found in my visits to free font download sites is
that while some mention OTF format downloads, none of their
fonts actually seem to be available in OTF format.

  Thanks, but Adobe doesn't seem to work for me lately.
It's strange. I thought that maybe I'd accidentally added
them to my hosts file, but that wasn't the case. I just
get a network timeout with any Adobe URL. Could Adobe
possibly be blocking anyone without Flash?) I first noticed
it a few days ago when I went to check into their Adobe
Type Manager:

http://www.adobe.com/products/atmlight/

  From what I found online it seems that there may or may
not be a light version, which may or may not be free, which
may or may not be able to convert .OTF to .TTF. But I
haven't been able to get through to their site in order to
get the details.

I don't think the extension is a major thing, apart from the way extensions
are used in Windows as a convenient marker of a file's type for various
reasons (double clicking and the like). I think most applications, or at
least certainly the Windows font handling systems, care more about what a
file actually contains rather than what its file extension is. For example,
you can create a file with a .txt extension  (test1.txt) and if that file
actually contains the data of a valid bitmap file then MS Paint will open it
without any problems if you use the MS Paint File /Open menu to do so.

I do. I have both Open Type and True Type fonts, with the vast majority
being Open Type and only a small number being standard True Type, but in all
cases the filename of the font file has a .ttf extension. I think that's
probably the norm in Vista. The Control Panel fonts applet knows what kind
of font data they contain though, almost certainly because it examines the
actual file contents (or at least part of the contents), even though they
all have a .ttf file extension.

For example, if in the Control Panel Fonts applet I right click Allegro BT
(which has a True Type icon against it) I can see that it is in a file
called allegron.ttf (a fact which is confirmed by my own VB code which digs
out font file names) and when I double click it to display more details I
can see that, amongst other things, it is a 'True Type Outline'. When I then
right click the font
Andalus (which has a Open Type icon against it) I can see that it is in a
file called andlso.ttf (again, confirmed by my own font file name code) and
when I double click it to display more details I can see that, amongst other
things, it is a 'True Type Outline with an Open Type Layout". So clearly
these two font files, both of which have a .ttf file extension, contain
different things. One is a standard True Type Font whereas the other is an
Open Type Layout with True Type outlines", whattever that means :-)

As  said earlier, I don't really know anything about Open Type fonts, other
than the fact that they are supposed to be cross platform fonts and that
they are effectively "True Type on steroids" with a lot more character
glyphs as standard. And you're almost certainly right in that there are
probably a number of different 'flavours' of Open Type fonts out there.

Mike

Daylight savings issue?

Jeff Johnson wrote:
I just happened to run across this site today, and remembered your question.

   http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/

I'll be curious if anyone tries/likes it!  I've wanted same, at times before.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Type
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueType

OK sort of.
I do not have all the permutations of Windows so testing is out of the
question.
I guess I will have to set some plain vanilla fontname and then try to
change to the one I want and see if it error out.  That is all I can think of.



Show quoteHide quote

Some of your questions were addressed, so I'm going to focus on one question
that wasn't:

Yes.

I have no idea how Windows decides what font to use if the specified font is
unavailable, but I do know it attempts to make the best match it can. That's
not to say your app (or report, print out, whatever) will look decent if
that font's not available and Windows has to substitute a different font.

So, bottom line is to stick with common fonts (those included with Windows)
or fonts you can legally redistribute (and install).

For the most part, fonts usually have very similar copyrights, distribtion
rights, licensing, etc. as software. You need to check with the publisher of
the font to see if it can be redistributed or what restrictions there might
be in redistributing it.

It would seem that I might be on your blocked senders list, MikeD, and
possibly also on the OP's, (although of course if I am then neither of you
will see this post either!) but in fact my own response did address that
specific question. In fact it answered it in some detail.

Mike

Thanks all.

Show quoteHide quote

I use the following site to determine the chances that a font will be in
place on the user's PC:

http://codestyle.org/winfontresults

For Arial, this gives 97.94% of the systems have it.

For Lucida (monospaced), the one I'm familiar with is actually called Lucida
Sans Typewriter, and it's only 13.23% A better monospaced font, based on
popularity, would be Courier New with 97.45%. Oh, I see there's a Lucida
Console with 97.25%; guess that would be good too.

Show quoteHide quote

  That's an interesting list. Thanks. But I wonder how
useful it is. The survey is a self-selecting group, presumably
interested in fonts, who also have Java installed, are
comfortable enabling Java, and are interested enough in
all this to let the website run a scan of their computer.

  A few odd examples:

Palatino 97%+ - I've never heard of that. Apparently it
was introduced in Win2000.

Georgia 95% - According to Mike William's chart that was
added with Win2000. 95% is good to know, but "installed
since 2000" would be far more useful.

Times New Roman 91% - ?? That's always been the default
serif font on Windows. Have 9% of all font buffs uninstalled
it because they detest it so much? Or maybe it was removed
on Vista and there are a high number of font buffs using
Vista? But why would MS discontinue a font that was formerly
the standard serif font, especially on a system so bloated with
various unnecessary junk that it needs a DVD to put the install
on?

  The list of installed fonts that Mike Williams posted seems like
it might be a safer bet, since the vast majority of people don't
really consciously notice fonts and don't know or care what they
have installed.

  Personally I stick to arial or verdana. Arial is more attractive
but less readable. MS Sans Serif combines readability with
compactness, but it's downright ugly. Georgia and TNR are
both ugly, and as seriffed fonts are not as easily readable
on a monitor. Tahoma is OK, but somewhat ugly in its bulkiness,
giving it no advantage over Verdana.

Likewise with webpages: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif

   I list Helvetica for Macs. I was surprised that the link
you posted has a Mac survey that indicates wide installation
of common Windows fonts. Traditionally in web design people
have added Helvetica for Macs. Macs didn't used to even have
Arial. I'd guess that either 1) the Mac respondents are graphics
people who have deliberately installed Windows fonts or 2) Macs
have recently added Windows fonts. Either way, I'd be hesitant
to base anything on that survey.

Times New Roman has been present on all installations of Vista that I've
personally used. In fact to date I've never seen a Windows system that does
not have it. Mind you, I've never actually looked for it on a "vanilla"
machine and I've usually already installed an Office package before I do.
But I really don't see the problem in having your code install it if it does
not exist. Surely there can be no licencing problem there? I mean, Times New
Roman has been in use as a font, using exactly that name, since it was first
produced for The Times newspaper in England long before I was born, and
that's some time ago now and definitely long before Micro$oft ever saw the
light of day! Surely Micro$oft cannot have taken over full rights to it?
Have they stolen it perhaps?

Mike

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