Notes on typefaces, typography history, and the measurements behind the encyclopedia.
Before fonts were a business, they were a hobby with a zip file. The story of the 1990s freeware font scene — Larabie, Rakowski, Curtis, Klein, Steffmann — and the one-woman archive that kept it online.
· history, designers
A Brazilian lettering artist with hundreds of fonts and tens of millions of downloads is the most downloaded designer on FontSpace — and almost nobody has written about him. Until now.
· designers
The complete map of font file formats — TTF, OTF, WOFF, WOFF2, TTC and the fossils: Type 1, EOT, SVG, Speedo, suitcases. What each extension is, where it came from, whether it still matters, and which files you should never try to install.
· guides, reference
What a fraktur font is, where it sits in the blackletter family, how to read one — the long s, the ß, the shared I and J — and where to get real Fraktur faces free.
· history, styles
Installing a font means putting its file where your system keeps fonts — a two-minute job on Windows, Mac, and Linux. The quick path for each platform, plus the mistakes that make fonts 'not show up'.
· guides
Android has no single font answer — it depends on your phone's maker. Samsung and Xiaomi routes with zFont, the honest Pixel situation, and the one method that works on every Android phone: inside the app you're creating in.
· guides
iPhones have no fonts folder — fonts install through an installer app and a settings profile. The free route with iFont, where the fonts work afterward, how to remove them, and the profile safety rule everyone should know.
· guides
Four ways to install a font on Windows — the preview window, right-click, drag-and-drop in Settings, and the Fonts folder — plus fixes for 'not a valid font', duplicates, and fonts that refuse to appear in your apps.
· guides
Two font extensions, one simple answer: both install the same way and both work everywhere modern. What TTF and OTF actually are, the real differences underneath, and the tiebreak rule when a download offers you both.
· guides
You've seen Rudolf Koch's letters in the Jurassic Park logo and on a thousand beer labels. Here's who he was, which of his fonts — Kabel, Neuland, his Fraktur faces — are worth your time, and where to get them free.
· designers, history
How font.io measures stroke contrast — the ratio between a letter's thickest and thinnest strokes, measured straight off the outlines.
· metrics
How font.io measures slant — the lean of the lowercase l in degrees, fitted through the middle of its stem.
· metrics
How font.io measures font weight — the width of the capital H's stem as a share of the font's size, from thin to black.
· metrics
How font.io measures font width — the average advance of the lowercase letters, from condensed to extended.
· metrics
How font.io measures x-height — the median body height of five lowercase letters, which decides how big a font reads.
· metrics