The best website for free high-quality Bodoni Classic Chancery fonts, with 27 free Bodoni Classic Chancery fonts for immediate download, and 49 professional Bodoni Classic Chancery fontsfor the best price on the Web. 27Free Bodoni Classic Chancery Fonts. GFS Bodoni ClassicHideShowAdd to FavoriteDownload. Cursive (also known as joint writing or running writing, or handwriting) is any style of penmanship in which the symbols of the language are written in a conjoined and/or flowing manner, generally for the purpose of making writing faster. In the Arabic, Latin, and Cyrillic alphabets, many or all letters in a word are connected, sometimes making a word one single complex stroke.

In A History of Font Technologies, I talked a bit about font technologies on the Mac. If you are unfamiliar with terms like “bitmapped” or “outline” fonts, you might want to read that article first. Here I am going to discuss the fonts that Apple has shipped with the Mac. I am on my way to an unusual suggestion that I hope you will consider.

When the Macintosh first shipped, it had a number of bitmapped fonts. Back in 1990, when I started working with Macs, there were a number of standard fonts that are still familiar today, such as Chicago, Geneva, Helvetica, Palatino, and Times. These shipped with System 6 and earlier versions of the Mac OS.

But early Macs also had a bunch of funky fonts that gave the Mac loads of character. There were dingbat fonts (picture fonts) like Cairo and Mobile. The San Francisco font, which looked like a ransom note, lent itself to playful documents. The Venice font was a favorite of many, since it was an easy to read script-like font.

In 1991, System 7 introduced TrueType fonts that were scaleable to any size. Apple did not make TrueType versions of all of the funky fonts, but they did make versions of the more businesslike fonts, such as Helvetica and Palatino. After a few years of transition, nearly everyone uses only outline fonts like TrueType or PostScript.

Classic Fonts

In System 7.5, Apple introduced its last bitmapped fonts – Espy Sans and Espy Serif. These fonts were designed to look good on screens. Apple made these fonts for its Newton PDA and used them for its fated online service called eWorld. Around that time there were screen shots of the next generation Mac Operating System; it used Espy Sans Bold for it’s system font instead of Chicago.

You might be saying to yourself, “Wait! I’ve had System 7.5 on my Quadra for years, and I’ve never seen any Espy Sans font.” This font wasn’t installed in the Fonts folder inside the System Folder. Instead, it was inside the Apple Guide and could only be released for general use by using a program like ResEdit.

With Mac OS 8, Apple introduced an alternative system font named Charcoal. It was a TrueType font that looked a little bit like a cross between Chicago and Espy Sans Bold – people were expecting Espy as the new System font. Hidden inside the Appearance Manager that provided Charcoal, was the hint of future system fonts that finally showed up in System 8.5 like Gadget, Capitals, Sand, and Techno. The Gadget font was my personal favorite, and a survey I suggested on ResExcellence showed that it was the favorite of readers of that site. These fonts reintroduced some of the character that the Mac used to have back in System 6.

Note: Espy Sans was last used as the system font on the iPod mini in 2005.

Free Classic Fonts For Mac Os

A Suggestion

Before I give my unusual suggestion, let me ask you a question. Do you print pages from Low End Mac? If not, my suggestion is to use Espy Sans and Espy Serif for everything. (Download espy.sea [24K].)

I have two reasons for suggesting this. First, the Espy fonts are fabulous screen fonts. As a Peace Corps Volunteer, I taught some word processing to teachers at my school. I saw four teachers in a row drawn to Espy fonts because they were so easy to read. Second, bitmapped fonts like Espy display slightly faster than TrueType fonts, especially on older Macs like the Macintosh Plus, SE, and Classic.

Free Fonts For Apple Mac

To go even farther, you might throw out a bunch of your TrueType fonts. Start with the fonts you never use. If you have an 80 MB or smaller hard drive (common on early Macs), you might gain a megabyte or two of hard drive space. You can keep the bitmapped versions of the fonts (which have 1 A on their icon instead of the 3 A’s on a TrueType font.)

If you do print, I still suggest that you weed out your font folder. You might keep Palatino and Helvetica, because they are TrueType fonts that print great, but they also have bitmaps that are optimized for your screen. You might toss out New York (it doesn’t print as well as Palatino) and Times (it doesn’t look as good on the screen as Palatino). If you have fewer fonts, you will be faster with your Mac, since you won’t have to scroll through as many font options. I know that many Mac users are font fanatics – I used to be one of them. But in the end most people keep returning to few favorite fonts. Why not get rid of the fonts you don’t use?

A caveat about this suggestion: Don’t throw out something unless you are sure that you won’t want it in the future. You might just move fonts out of the font folder instead of trashing them.

In my next article, I’ll talk about a how you can use Espy for everything.

Sources for Espy and Espy-like Fonts

• Boston Omnis FTP Download Index for Espy Sans and Espy Serif.
• Download espy.sea from Low End Mac.
• The Nu Font Pack by Marty Pfeiffer. Nu Sans and Nu Serif are based on Espy Sans and Espy Serif, respectively. Available in both TrueType and Postscript versions. Shareware.
• Epsy Sans, TrueType and Postscript Type 1 adaptations of Apple’s Espy Sans font. Free.

Keywords: #espy #macfonts #macsystemfonts #systemfonts #espysans #espyserif #espyfont

Short link: http://goo.gl/uHYQ0O

searchword: macsystemfonts

Last updated: 2008/06/03

Return to the main page

Introduction

Here you can find the list with the standard set of fonts common to all versions of Windows and their Mac substitutes, referred sometimes as 'browser safe fonts'. This is the reference I use when making web pages and I expect you will find it useful too.

If you are new to web design, maybe you are thinking: 'Why I have to limit to that small set of fonts? I have a large collection of nice fonts in my computer'. Well, as seasoned web designers already know, browsers can use only the fonts installed in each computer, so it means that every visitor of your web page needs to have all the fonts you want to use installed in his/her computer. Of course, different people will have different fonts installed, and thus come the need of a standard set of fonts. Fortunately, CSS allows set several values for the font-family property, which eases the task a bit.

If you want to know how the fonts are displayed in other OS's or browsers than yours, after the table you can find several screen shots of this page in different systems and browsers. Also, you can take a look to the list of the default fonts included with each version of Windows.

The list

First, a few introductory notes:

• The names in grey are the generic family of each font.
• In some cases the Mac equivalent is the same font, since Mac OS X also includes some of the fonts shipped with Windows.
• The notes at the bottom contains specific information about some of the fonts.

Fonts

¹ Georgia and Trebuchet MS are bundled with Windows 2000/XP and they are also included in the IE font pack (and bundled with other MS applications), so they are quite common in Windows 98 systems.

² Symbolic fonts are only displayed in Internet Explorer, in other browsers a font substitute is used instead (although the Symbol font does work in Opera and the Webdings works in Safari).

³ Book Antiqua is almost exactly the same font that Palatino Linotype, Palatino Linotype is included in Windows 2000/XP while Book Antiqua was bundled with Windows 98.

⁴ These fonts are not TrueType fonts but bitmap fonts, so they won't look well when using some font sizes (they are designed for 8, 10, 12, 14, 18 and 24 point sizes at 96 DPI).

⁵ These fonts work in Safari but only when using the normal font style, and not with bold or italic styles. Comic Sans MS works in bold but not in italic. Other Mac browsers seems to emulate properly the styles not provided by the font (thanks to Christian Fecteau for the tip).

⁶ These fonts are present in Mac OS X only if Classic is installed (thanks to Julian Gonggrijp for the corrections).

Mac Font Download

How the fonts look in different systems and browsers

• Mac OS X 10.4.8, Firefox 2.0, font smoothing enabled (thanks to Juris Vecvanags for the screen shot)
• Mac OS X 10.4.4, Firefox 1.5, font smoothing enabled (thanks to Eric Zavesky for the screen shot)
• Mac OS X 10.4.11, Safari 3.0.4, font smoothing enabled (thanks to Nolan Gladius for the screen shot)
• Mac OS X 10.4.4, Safari 2.0.3, font smoothing enabled (thanks to Eric Zavesky for the screen shot)
• Windows Vista, Internet Explorer 7, ClearType enabled (thanks to Michiel Bijl for the screen shot)
• Windows Vista, Firefox 2.0, ClearType enabled (thanks to Michiel Bijl for the screen shot)
• Linux (Ubuntu 7.04 + Gnome), Firefox 2.0 (thanks to Juris Vecvanags for the screen shot)

Note that while the ClearType smoothing is applied always, the basic font smoothing of Windows 98/2000/XP is applied only to certain font sizes. That sizes can be specified by the font designer, but usually they are in the ranges of 0-6 and 14+ points (pt).

The Mac font list was obtained from the Browser Safe Fonts PDF of webbedEnvironments and from the List of fonts in Mac OS X of the Wikipedia.

Return to the main page