OpenOffice.org Off the Wall: Fonts of Wisdom

The selection of fonts is central to document design. Knowing how to
choose fonts not only affects legibility, but it also reinforces a document's
tone and content. Yet, until recently, few Linux users gave font selection
much thought. Font installation was esoteric, and the user-base consisted
mainly of developers, who generally preferred the markup language approach
of delivering content that leaves layout to style sheets and XSLTs.

In the last few years, the push to prepare Linux for the desktop has
changed all of that. On both KDE and GNOME, font installation now is as
easy to accomplish as it is on any other operating system. In addition, the introduction
of office suites such as OpenOffice.org has introduced Linux to software
that encourage users to think about format as much as content.

Even if you are not a content-purist, these changes sometimes seem to be a
mixed blessing. They not only threaten new users with option anxiety,
they also are a major cause of design atrocities. The trouble is, design
in general and font selection in particular in an office suite require
a rare mixture of skills. On the one hand, successful font selection
requires a technical knowledge of both how fonts work and the tools available
in the office suite for selecting and manipulating them. On the other
hand, it also requires a knowledge of design and of what choices are
likely to work in a given set of circumstances. What's more, neither
body of knowledge is much good without the other.

What follows is an introduction to some of the basic issues as they
apply to Linux and OpenOffice.org: What fonts are available? How are
they installed? What tools in OpenOffice.org allow you to make use of
them? Most important of all, what do you need to consider when selecting
and customizing fonts? A complete answer to even one of these questions
could fill a book. However, the brief answers that follow should
help you make more informed choices about using fonts. Whether you are
using manual overrides or paragraph and character styles, once you can
work with fonts effectively, you are one step closer to using the full
power of OpenOffice.org.
Understanding Font Formats
Linux supports several different font formats. However, despite attempts
over the years to introduce new formats, the majority of fonts still are
either PostScript (aka Type1 or Adobe) or TrueType.

Postscript, of course, is the printer language created by Adobe
Systems. PostScript fonts can be used by a PostScript
printer without conversion. Each PostScript font has several files
associated with it. The files have the same name, but a different
extension:

• .afm (Adobe Font Metrics): contains the proportions for each character
  in the font. Necessary for displaying or printing the
  font.
• .pfb (Printer Binary Font): contains instructions
  on how to print the font.
• .inf and .pfm: Windows-only files. Not needed
  for use under Linux.

TrueType is a format first introduced on the Mac and later popularized by
Windows. In some circles, TrueType fonts still have a bad reputation. This
reputation is due partly to the fact that the PostScript printing language
did not support TrueType when the format was introduced. Mainly, though,
the bad rep is traceable to the fact that many of the first TrueType
fonts were poor-quality conversions of PostScript font. Neither concern
has much validity today, but the reputation lingers. TrueType fonts
include all information about displaying and printing in a single file,
with a .ttf extension.

Which format you use is relevant only for installation.The myth persists
that TrueType fonts are superior for on-screen display; while that
theoretically is true, in practice even the best screen resolutions are
too low for any difference to be noticeable. On the other side, because
PostScript fonts do not need to be converted when sent to a printer,
they might be considered more likely to print exactly as you seem them on
screen. And, in fact, PostScript fonts do seem to have fewer problems
when you import from OpenOffice.org to .pdf format, PostScript's close
cousin. Yet, for the most part, you can choose the font format based on
availability and usefulness rather than technical merits.
Installing Fonts
Fonts used in OpenOffice.org can be installed in two main ways: in
the X Window System in general or in OpenOffice.org in particular. In
both cases, you should install only the fonts you need. Font files are
relatively small in themselves, but collections of several thousand
fonts are common, and installing this many fonts would deliver a
serious blow to your machine's performance. Better in either case to
load or unload fonts as you need them.

The advantage of installing in the X Window System is the fonts are
available for all desktop applications, including GNOME, KDE and window
managers. The old-fashioned way is to install a font server (for example,
xfs and xfstt for TrueType fonts or type1inst for PostScript fonts)
Installing any of these font servers may involve editing the XF86Config
file. Full instructions for installing are available
here.

More recently, the KDE Control Center has included a font installer,
while GNOME offers a plug-in to Nautilus called Fontilus. Both offer a
graphical installer for fonts comparable to the Adobe Type Manager on
Windows or OS X.

The advantage of installing only to OpenOffice.org is the fonts
don't drag down general system performance. The brute force method is to
copy font files into the /user/fonts directory for your OpenOffice.org
installation. Alternatively, you can run spadmin, a utility that runs
outside of OpenOffice.org proper and includes the installation of fonts
on a printer-by-printer basis.

None of these methods have significant advantages over the
others. What matters is not which method you choose but that you use
it consistently. Mixing the methods can cause duplicate entries and
general confusion.
Serifs, Sans Serifs and Others
The majority of fonts fall into two categories, serif and sans
serif. Serif fonts have small feet or hooks at the tops and bottoms of
vertical lines; sans serifs do not.

Figure 1. The major categories of fonts. Notice the serifs
or feet at the ends of lines in the serif sample and how much broader
and even the serifs are in the slab serif. The third line shows a sample
of a dingbat font.

Times New Roman is the most widely used serif font, and Helvetica and
Arial the most widely-used sans serif. Because many computers have
these fonts, using them or near-replicas often means that exporting
and importing files between computers is easy. But the price you
pay for this convenience is an utterly conventional design. Hundreds
of alternatives are available, including thousands of free fonts that
can be found on the Internet.

The North American convention in printing is to use serif fonts for body
text and mostly sans serif fonts for headings. By this standard, using
sans serif fonts for body text looks innovative and avant-garde. By
contrast, in Europe, san serif fonts often are used for body text,
although in some places American cultural influence appears to be making this
standard less common.

On-line, sans serif fonts are used more often than serifs. Screen
resolutions are much lower than the resolution of text in the average
book, and serifs often do not reproduce well. An exception is the
sub-category of slab serif fonts, which use especially large serifs.

Other font categories include:

• Script fonts: fonts that resemble handwriting, sometimes called
  calligraphic fonts. Whatever their name, they usually should be avoided
  in business documents or on-line.
• Display fonts: fonts designed for headings or for brief lines or
  paragraphs in advertising, posters and brochures. Display fonts should
  not be used for body text, because they often can be hard to read in
  long paragraphs.
• Monospaced fonts: fonts in which each letter is the same width. By
  contrast, most fonts are proportional, with different letters having
  different widths. Monospaced fonts were used in the original command-line
  interfaces on computers. For this reason, many people still use
  them to indicate commands to type in technical material. Courier, the
  most common monospaced font, is perhaps the ugliest font ever designed,
  but a few monospaced fonts look as good as proportional fonts.
• Dingbats: fonts that consist of pictures or designs rather than
  characters. Hundreds of dingbat fonts exist. Some, like Zapf dingbats,
  have general-purpose pictures. Others have themes, such as flowers or
  portraits. One use for dingbats in Writer is as unusual bullets.

Whatever its category, each font creates its own impression. When you
choose a font, think about the impression you want to convey and the
tone and content of your message. In conventional typography, the goal
is to enhance the message, not to call attention to the choice of fonts.
Choosing Fonts
Fonts are easy to overdo. So many fonts are available these days that
it is easy to use too many at once. Similarly, an office suite can
transform them in so many ways that you quickly can enhance a font
into illegibility. If you restrict your documents to no more than two
or three fonts apiece, and minimize the effects, you should
improve the readability and the design of your documents.

This restriction is not as rigid as it sounds. Each font generally is
divided into several typefaces or variants. The standard font usually is
called regular or roman, although in the case of some fonts designed by
Adrian Frutiger, it is designated 55 instead. Most fonts have at least
three other typefaces, some combination of regular, italic, bold and bold
italic. Some fonts also have narrow, expanded, oblique, extra bold or other versions. For
this reason, using only two or three fonts actually means having at
least eight to twelve typefaces available.

Figure 2. The four main typefaces in a font. Some fonts add
a half dozen more, such as Thin, Medium, Oblique and/or Ultra Black.
Selecting Fonts in OpenOffice.org
If you are formatting manually, you can select from the available
fonts by using the second drop-down list from the left on the Object tool
bar. By default, the list previews fonts by displaying each font's name in
the font itself. In addition, the most recently used fonts in the document
appear at the top of the list, directly below the one in use at the current
cursor position. Both of these options can be turned off to save memory in
Tools -> Options -> OpenOffice.org -> View. Other buttons on the Object bar
manually format the size, typeface, color and background. Alternatively,
in Writer, you can select the default, heading, list, caption and index
fonts in Tools -> Options -> Text Documents -> Basic Fonts.

If you want more control, select Format -> Character for the currently
highlighted text string. If you want to format the entire paragraph,
select it. There are no font settings in Format -> Paragraph. By
contrast, if you are using styles, you find the same set of options in
the formatting window for both character and paragraph style. In any
OpenOffice.org application, the easiest way to open a style's formatting
window is by selecting the style in the Stylist and then picking Modify
from the right-click menu. Whether you are formatting manually or using
styles, you can set font characteristics from three tabs:

• Font: contains settings for the font, typeface,
  size and language.
• Font Effects: font formatting.
• Position: how the font is placed in relation to a line of text
  and the spacing between characters. This tab is unique to Writer, the
  application most concerned with text formatting.

In practice, you probably will need to jump back and forth between these
tabs as you design.
Selecting Basic Font Characteristics
The formatting of fonts begins on the Font tab. Start with the font,
the highest level of organization. The font you choose determines the
typefaces available.

Figure 3. The starting place for fonts, the Font Tab is found in
all four OpenOffice.org applications.

As the name suggests, the Regular typeface is the one most commonly
used. Most of the time, therefore, you should select fonts on the basis
of the Regular typeface. For on-line documents, you want a font with
strokes of even thickness. Italics are used for emphasis and titles on
paper. Bold typefaces usually are used on-line for the same purpose,
because many italic typefaces are hard to read on-line. Increasingly,
bold typefaces are used on paper, too.

One oddity of OpenOffice.org is the variation in how typefaces display. In
some cases, all the typefaces belonging to the same font family display
together in the font selection lists. In other cases, each typeface is
listed separately, so that font lists have several entries for a single
font. No one has explained fully this irregularity, but it seems to be
due to how typefaces are listed in the font files themselves. Whatever
the reason, be aware that you may have to search for a typeface.

Once you select the typeface, consider the font size. The size is the
space given to each character and the area around it, not only the size
of a character itself. For this reason, different fonts use different
amounts of space, which means that fonts of the same size can have
letters of a different height.

Font size is measured in points. One point is about 1/72nd of an inch. A
readable font size for body text usually lies somewhere between 10-14
points, depending on the font. 8 points usually is a minimum. However,
more spacing between lines (Indents and Spacing -> Line Spacing) makes
a small font easier to read.

As a final step, you may want to choose the language and language locale
used by the style. If the dictionaries for the language and locale are
not installed in Tools -> Options -> Language Settings, or if
Tools -> Spellcheck or Tools -> Hyphenate are not set to use this language,
any paragraphs formatted with this style will not be checked or
hyphenated.
Selecting Font Effects
The Font Effects tab contains the finishing touches for the font
selection. Some, including relief, outline and shadow, should be used
sparingly. As for the on-line blink effect, many Web designers consider
it so annoying that it should not be used at all.

Figure 4. Available from all OpenOffice.org applicatins,
the Font Effects tab customizes your fonts for different needs.

More practically, the Effects settings determines how the paragraph or
selected characters are capitalized. Possible choices are:

• Without: capitals are inserted as needed. In most cases, you probably
  want to accept this default.
• Capitals: all characters in the paragraph use ordinary capitals. Use
  this setting sparingly. Paragraphs in all capitals are hard to
  read, and the on-line convention is that capitals are the same as
  shouting. Moreover, ordinary capitals are not designed for this use;
  if you need a paragraph in all capitals, use small capitals
  instead.
• Lowercase: no characters in the paragraph are
  capitalized.
• Title: the first letter of each word is capitalized. This setting is
  ideal for headings.
• Small capitals: all characters in the paragraph use small
  capitals. Small capitals are special characters designed specifically for
  three or more capitals in a row. If you need a paragraph in all capitals,
  use small capitals instead of ordinary ones.

However, the most workaday font effect is font color. The font color
should be chosen with the settings selected on the Background tab in
mind. Common sense rules apply for readability: a dark font for a light
background and a light font for a dark background. Light fonts on a
dark background can be hard to read, especially on-line, so keep such
designs brief.
Setting Font Positions
In Writer, you have a third tab for setting up fonts, Position. It
contains options for how fonts are positioned on the base line, the
imaginary line on which characters such as m and x sit. Commonly used
options are for superscript, characters that start above the
baseline of other characters, and subscript, characters that start below
the baseline of other characters. For both superscript and subscript
characters, you can choose the percentage of the full font size by which
characters are raised or lowered, plus the percentage of the full font
size for the characters themselves.
Figure 5. Found only in Writer, the Position tab customizes the
display of fonts.

For more advanced users, the Position tab also includes:

• Rotation/scaling: sets the angle at which text formatted by the paragraph
  style is at. Choices are O, 90 (at right angles) and 270 (reversed)
  degrees.
• Scale width: adjusts the width of the space given to each character
  formatted by the style. This setting should be changed only by small
  degrees. Otherwise, the result can look unprofessional or even
  unreadable.
• Spacing: adjusts the space between each character formatted by the
  style. You can select the default spacing, set by the font metrics,
  or you can expand or condense. More than any other option, spacing needs
  to be selected with care and a healthy amount of trial and error.
  Spacing is considered carefully by font designers, and changing it
  frequently proves disastrous.
• Pair kerning: adjusts the spacing between certain combinations of letters
  to improve the general look. This setting should be selected for almost
  all fonts. In a few cases, however, the effect makes the spacing
  look worse instead of better.

Finding Out More
This article barely introduces the subject of fonts. Hundreds of books
and articles are available on the subject, and many people have made it
a lifelong study. Below are two books that can teach you how to improve
your design work. Both are relatively inexpensive and won't be outgrown
in a hurry; you'll return to them again and again:

The Non-Designer's Design Book. 2nd. Ed. Robin
Williams. Berkley, CA: Peachpit Press. 2003. A quick and entertaining introduction to design
and layout, especially on a computer. Many professional designers have
been introduced to design by this book.

The Elements of Typographic Style. 2nd. Ed. Robert Bringhurst.
Vancouver, CAN: Hartley and Marks. 1996. One
of the Bibles of modern typography. Bringhurst explains in detail the
issues of design, trying hard to be reasonable and non-dogmatic in
his comments. Although not as accessible as William's book, this one
is more complete. Use it as an encyclopedia of design issues.

Bruce Byfield was a manager at Stormix Technologies and Progeny
Linux Systems and a Contributing Editor at Maximum Linux. Away from his
desktop, he listens to punk-folk music, raises parrots and runs long,
painful distances of his own free will. He currently is writing a book
on OpenOffice.org.