Terrific Text with Embird Font Engine and alphabets (Part 1)

Did you know that embroidered logos are one of the most-requested and used embroidery designs? And, of course when designing logos, you are going to be using text. Both the Embird alphabets and Font Engine text embroider wonderfully well, both at very large or very small sizes. Some true type fonts and/or alphabets will embroider more successfully at different sizes, but as a general rule, you can’t beat Embird text!

There are two ways to digitize text within Embird. You can either use one of the 39 available pre-digitized Embird alphabets or use true or open-type fonts with the Font Engine plug-in. With Font Engine not only can you use true-type and open-type fonts, you can also use dingbats to create embroidery designs (If you don’t know what dingbats are, they are basically small pictures in font format, so if you want to create a design with a particular dingbat, you must install the dingbat (as a font).)

After installing the font, open the Font Engine plug-in and find the dingbat/font, and start creating some really unusual designs.It is a wonderful, easy-to-use program and you will be amazed at what you can create with it from something very simple like the smiley to the right or even more complicated dingbat designs.

There are many sites on the Internet where you can download free fonts and dingbats to use as embroidery designs. But a word of warning – do not install every font you find into the Windows font folder or you will slow down your computer and make it difficult to find any fonts when you are looking for them. Use a Font Manager program (there are many free available on the net) and install only the fonts or dingbats you wish to use on a regular basis. You can uninstall the fonts quite easily through the Font Manager program as well, but still retain them on your computer. The Font Manager program I use and highly recommend is FontSmart Lite which can be downloaded from http://www.activedesign.co.za/software/index.htm. It’s very easy to use and one of its best features is that it allows you to view the fonts you have before installing them. It is an older program but does work with Vista.

When downloading fonts or dingbats, download them to a specific folder on your hard drive so that you will have them all in one folder. Unzip each font into the font folder, deleting any unnecessary text files included in the zip.

If you are an avid font/dingbat collector and don’t always have time to surf the net, there is a group at Yahoo that will send you fonts once a week or so. It is called fontpacks@yahoogroups.com and is well worth joining – you don’t receive tons of e-mail just links for fonts! I had belonged to this group for a while, but had left the list because of the sheer number of fonts you receive every month. However, recently I found another older program that allows me to just browse through any single folder and decide whether I want to keep or delete fonts, so I very happily rejoined the list. Unzip the fonts to a temporary folder with a name such as “to be viewed fonts”. Then browse through the fonts with Font XPlorer. You can browse through 500-odd fonts in a few moments, deciding which ones you want to keep and deleting the balance. Then move the “keepers” to your font folder.

There may be just the perfect true type font you saw on the net or someone has asked you to use in an embroidery design, but you can’t seem to find the name of it How do you identify a font, without sending a sample to everyone you know?

You could contact the author, publisher or designer of course, but that is often not a possibility. And with millions of fonts around, many looking similar, it can be impossible to nail down the one you have seen. Listed below is are a few websites to help you get started identifying fonts:

http://www.identifont.com – this site lets you answer a series of questions about the appearance of the font you are looking for, including information about fonts from selected major type libraries.

http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont – this site works by uploading a sample image of the font you are looking for. You can then modify the specifications and narrow down the search. This method does have its limitation since it is a program that analyzes the sample image, and not a human being.

http://www.font-finder.com- this site lists other resources on how to identify a font, including databases, books, catalogs and software. There are, however, some broken links.

There are many other resources on the web, but these are a good starting point to identify fonts.

(See Part 2 of this article for more information on digitizing with Font Engine and Embird alphabets)