Know Your Mac Fonts

Here is some information about the English fonts installed with OS X Leopard.

American Typewriter resembles a monospaced typewriter face, but the characters are proportionally spaced and therefore easier to read. Proportional or not, it still looks like a typewriter if that is what you want.

Andale Mono is a monospaced sans serif typeface developed for computer terminals and software development. Some consider it more readable than monospace alternatives such as Courier. It includes some technical, mathematical, and box drawing characters.

Apple Chancery, named after a Renaissance script style, was designed by Hermann Zapf. It provides a strong calligraphic effect. To get the most out of this font, open Character Palette and note the many ligatures, swashes, variations, and ornaments available. Or use the Font palette’s action button to reveal the typographic options: Number Spacing, Smart Swashes, Vertical Position, Design Complexity (simple, elegant, and two sets of flourishes), and Number Case. Apple Chancery strongly resembles Hermann Zapf’s Chancery Medium Italic.

Baskerville is a transitional typeface designed by the Englishman John Baskerville in 1757. Benjamin Franklin admired Baskerville and popularized the typeface in America. More readable than most transitional text fonts, Baskerville connotes dignity and tradition.

Big Caslon is designed for use at 18 points and larger. It does not include bold or italic faces. It derives from the design of William Caslon in 1734, whose typeface achieved enormous popularity in England and America.

BlairMdITC TT-Medium, clearly not named by the marketing department, is a sans serif small caps font with wide letterforms. It rather resembles Copperplate without the serifs, and like Copperplate it connotes refinement. Because it has no bold or italic faces, you are more likely to use it on a business card than in a headline.

Bordeaux Roman Bold LET is an extremely condensed typeface with the flat serifs and strong contrast of the modern text category.

Brush Script comes with this description, which you can read in Font Book: “This heavy, informal script looks as though it was written with a brush because its lowercase letters join together. Use the uppercase letters primarily as initials, although you might find it interesting to use all capitals of this typeface for some words.” Developed in 1942 and popular in the 1950s, Brush Script today has a nostalgic look. It has a Vertical Position typographic feature.

Chalkboard, clearly an alternative to Microsoft’s Comic Sans, was made by Apple in 2003. Like Comic Sans it is a casual non-connecting script that resembles comic book lettering, but the Chalkboard letterforms look less hastily drawn.

Cochin is a transitional Parisian text font from 1912. Letters are wide with tall ascenders. It is a beautiful typeface, slightly less readable than the traditional text faces.

Copperplate was designed by F. W. Goudy in 1901 to imitate the look of engraving. It might be deemed a sans serif font ornamented with tiny precise serifs. It’s a small caps font in three weights. Like true engraving, it’s not appropriate for text longer than a short sentence.

Courier—known by all and loathed by many—is a thin monospaced typeface that might be deemed the most primitive of all the typefaces on a computer. Microsoft altered the metrics, changed some punctuation, and added an enormous character set to their release as Courier New.

Cracked is used in iWeb’s Night Life theme. Some might like it; we couldn’t say.

Didot includes this description:“The strong clear forms of this alphabet display objective, rational characteristics and are representative of the time and philosophy of the Enlightenment. . . . The font Didot gives text a classic and elegant feel.” Like its Italian cousin Bodoni, the French Didot features strong stroke contrast. It is wider than most text fonts and includes a bit of extra leading, so it looks slightly bigger than other text fonts at the same point size. Nevertheless, the extreme stroke contrast makes Didot difficult to read on screen.

Futura tells us this: “Futura seems classical, not only due to the form of its capitals, but also to the open, wide forms of the geometrical small letters. The typeface relies on notions of classical, yet contemporary form, - harmony and evenness of texture.” Futura is a workhorse sans serif font, ubiquitous and versatile. Unfortunately Leopard does not supply Futura Light, but it does provide medium, medium italic, condensed medium, and condensed extra bold.

Gill Sans was designed by Eric Gill in 1927 with the goal of creating a sans serif font that was readable enough to be used for text. Its readability comes from the roman models for its letterforms and its delicate stroke contrast. Leopard supplies Gill Sans in regular, italic, bold, bold italic, light, and light italic.

Handwriting - Dakota is a very casual non-connected script face used in the Road Trip theme of iWeb for that hastily-scribbled look.

Herculanum, from the Swiss designer Adrian Frutiger, suggests uppercase roman letterforms written with a stylus on a clay tablet. All characters are uppercase; typing a lowercase character produces an alternate form of the uppercase character. Herculanum has an Alternate Letters typographic feature; the alternate forms are slightly narrower.

Hoefler Text was designed to showcase Apple’s advanced typography technology, and consequently it contains nifty things like swash and old style characters, true small caps, advanced ligatures, seven variations of numerals, engraved caps, an ornaments font . . .  we could go on. Some of those features are not terribly easy to find, requiring a trip to Character Palette. From the font palette’s action button you can access the features Number Spacing, Smart Swashes, Character Alternates, Style Options (engraved caps), and Number Case. But the principal feature of Hoefler Text is its handsome face. The font looks good in print, reads well on screen, and is wide enough to look comfortable on the ridiculously large paper that fills our printer trays. Pagesmith classifies it as traditional because of its high readability.

Impact’s official blurb: “1965. Designed for the Stephenson Blake type foundry. A very heavy, narrow, sans serif face intended for use in newspapers, for headlines and in advertisements. Aptly named, this face has a very large "x" height with short ascenders and descenders.”

Marker Felt is not very popular just now. Its use in the iPhone Notes application has provoked many negative reactions. It’s another casual non-connected script typeface, but one that many people recognize and some do not like.

Optima, another Hermann Zapf design, blurs the distinction between serif and sans serif faces. Strokes swell at the end, leaving the suggestion of serifs. Extremely popular for fifty years, Optima requires careful selection of companion fonts; as a headline, for example, it can look too much like a serif font to provide an effective contrast with your text font. Optima continues to look good at large sizes.

Palatino for several years reigned as the Mac’s handsomest text font. Easy to read on screen, attractive in print, Palatino has large proportions that fit the wide paragraphs of office documents. Hermann Zapf designed Palatino to look good on poor-quality post-World War II paper. When readability is a concern, you can’t do better than Palatino. Many people know this, and the ubiquity of Palatino (and Microsoft’s imitation, Book Antiqua) has made it start to look a little tired.

Papyrus looks rough yet elegant. It combines roman letterforms, calligraphy, and the illusion of highly textured paper. Papyrus has two large variations of caps; you can apply them by choosing Large Capitals from the font palette’s action button.

PortagoITC TT is a stencil font. A somewhat odd typographic feature is Numeral Style, which offers “Old Style” numerals (actually lower case numerals).

Skia—Greek for shadow— relies on Greek rather than Roman letterforms. It was designed to demonstrate Apple’s QuickdrawGX technology. To see today’s remnants of that technology, look for Skia in Apple’s font panel, where you will find these variants: regular, light, bold, black, extended, light extended, black extended, condensed, light condensed, and black condensed. While you’re at it, use Font Book or Character Palette to look at Skia’s interesting ligatures. Skia offers the typographic features Number Spacing, Vertical Position, Fractions, and Number Case.

Times, as its name implies, was designed for newspaper columns. It is remarkably readable at small sizes and in short column widths. But try it on the giant column widths of office paper and it looks helplessly tight. On office documents, Times (and the Microsoft version, Times New Roman) is just plain ugly. Use it in narrow columns and it will be readable. But still boring.

Zapfino is the most calligraphic typeface you will ever see. Be sure to examine its repertoire in Font Book or Character Palette and enjoy Zapfino’s numerous fleurons, ornaments, swashes, ligatures, and arrows (which include female hands). If you use only the characters that appear as you type, you’re not using this font correctly. Zapfino has four variations for each uppercase letter, and five to ten variations for each lowercase letter, in addition to numerous ligatures. For the word Pagesmith, that’s 400,000 combinations! From the font palette’s action button you can select from five sets of typographic features, but you’ll discover more glyph possibilities by using Character Palette.

Microsoft Fonts

These fonts provide compatibility with Windows. We do not recommend them: Arial and its variants, Courier New, Georgia, Microsoft Sans Serif, Times New Roman, Trebuchet, Verdana, Webdings, and Wingdings.