frequently asked questions

How to install the fonts?

Detailed instructions with screenshots on how to download and install fonts on your computer can be found here: -> Win XP, 7 or -> Mac OS X!

First of all, unpack the download .zip file. To do so, use the zip functionality of your OS (Windows XP or newer, Mac OS X). Also, you could use Winzip. Unpack the contents of the zip file to a folder of your choice. In Windows, copy the .otf or .ttf files to the system fonts folder, usually C:\Windows\Fonts or C:\Winnt\Fonts. Installing the fonts in other programs such as MS Office, Photoshop etc. is unnecessary, as they are used system-wide. After the installation, you may want delete the downloaded .zip folder.
In Mac OS X, simply double click on the font files to open, then click 'Install'. The Font Book will open and show the installed font, also making it available system-wide.

How can I download a font?

This is really easy. Click on one of the font-previews and wait until a download dialogue pops up. Save the .zip file to your harddrive in some place where you can still find it later, such as the Desktop.

Can I download all the fonts in one .zip file?

No, sorry. This would create a lot of expensive download traffic on the server, even when creating .zip files for every letter or category (which would be a lot of work to keep up-to-date, too). If you want to download many fonts at a time, you can easily google your way to sites offering 1000s of fonts as a paid-for download.

Which fonts were used on Fontasy?

I used Gilligan's Island for the logo, Stone Sans for site titles and Zoomorphica for the A-Z font page titles.

Legal disclaimer - freeware / licensing / shareware?

This archive only contains free fonts, most of them are even "freeware", but there is also some "shareware" to find. The .zips often have additional textfiles including copyright information from the author of the font. If you find a commercial font in my archive, please contact me IMMEDIATELY! The font will be removed the same day. If such fonts stay online, this can easily lead to fontasy.de being closed down.
If you want to use one of the fonts commercially, please do - if possible - contact the designer of the respective font, except they explicitly allow commercial use without their consent.

How can I make my own fonts?

Read more on font software on my font tools page. Here is a summary:
There is a lot of different software to do this. Font Forge is a cross-platform open source font-editor for no money. Also there is the affordable Font Creator from High-Logic. If you want to do professional fonts, Fontlab should be the program of choice. Also neat is Meine Handschrift" by Data Becker. This really affordable old tool can create a font from your handwriting and has some basic font editing capabilites. A second hand version may be available at Amazon.de.

Why do the fonts look blurry when printed?

When printing a graphics file using fonts (if you don't have a damn good printer), fonts often look blurred. In these cases, you should use a DTP software like Pagemaker or Publisher and create a transparent text object on top of the graphic, which makes your printer print the ttf's as it's supposed to.

How did you make the preview graphics?

The font preview (and other) graphics on Fontasy.de were manually created using Adobe Photoshop or ULead PhotoImpact. The latter is available at low prices from Amazon. ULead has been acquired by Corel, so there is no free trial version any more. Some other graphics were also created with Fireworks (formerly from Macromedia).