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How to Use Text Tools for Your Web Site

Actually, there aren't a lot of fonts that are safe to use for the text and headlines of your web site. True, you may have 10,000 fonts on your hard drive - but does everyone who might possibly visit your site have those fonts on their hard drives? Not too likely.

The result is that your web page will look like garbage to most visitors. See Web-Safe Fonts to find out which ones you can most likely - and safely - use.

With that said, here are some useful tips and free resources:

http://www.stuff.uk.com/fonts/index.shtml - lots of free fonts (but use these in creating banners and graphics - NOT for the text on your web page - because there's only a rare chance that your visitors will have the same fonts. Use only Web-Safe Fonts.

Do a search on Google.com for "free fonts" (be sure to use the "" marks) or just click on the Google link. You'll come up with more than you could ever use in a lifetime - about 1.9 million websites pop up when you do this search!

There's a shareware program out there called Font Twister ($39 for registration - free 1.4 Mb download) that let's you do all kinds of artistic things to your text, then save it as a graphic. They also offer several fonts and textures you can use within fonts. Be sure to download the PDF manual, too.

Then there's Flaming Text, which lets you create animated text logos online at no cost. This site also has a sizeable collection of fonts, clip art, other headings and even some templates that might interest you. But the annoying pop-up ads may drive you away.

Even using just the "safe" fonts, there are hundreds of things you can to spice up your text.

Want to create your OWN fonts? Try Font Creator (free limited time 6.2 Mb download - $65 to buy). Font Creator puts font creation within the grasp of the average PC user, typographers and graphic designers.

The editor lets you easily select and modify the entire character set of any TrueType® font and fonts based on OpenType® font technology. Features include the ability to convert (scanned) images to outlines, thus enabling you to create fonts with your own signature, logo and handwriting.

They also offer the free Fix Fonts program (529 Kb) which, on Windows, lets you locate and fix font-related problems.

Font Lister 3.0 - www.acidfonts.com/fonts/fl.zip
"Great utility that you can download from the AcidFonts site. Once installed it lets you view installed fonts on your computer, you can also view uninstalled fonts on your PC, Zip disk, Floppy disk etc. And it's just 900K in size !"

Check out this Acid Fonts page for some useful font utilities!

TEXT EDITORS

Everyone needs a "down-and-dirty" Plain Jane word processor that doesn't add a lot of coding garbage (like MS Word and most other sophisticated WPs do). One of my favorites (Windows) is NoteTab. It's a free and easy download and the creator is easy to approach for help. It's been around for over 10 years, has won all kinds of awards and has NotePad beats hands down! I give it 5 stars out of 5.

Of course you can also use NotePad or WordPad that come with Windows.

If you're typing any content outside your WYSIWYG web designer program, you virtually MUST use one of these programs. Otherwise your web coding ends up looking like a nightmare's worst dream! NoteTab will even strip unwanted HTML out of text copied and pasted from another program or even the Internet itself.

You could also go to Google.com and type in "free text editor" and find several others that may work for you.

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