Fonts are little files that change the way text appears on the screen. I used "Comic Sans MS" font for my website but there are 1000s of fonts available for your use. When you install the Windows Operating System you get a set of System fonts that are required for Windows to run properly. Other fonts come with programs you install and the internet has 1000s more. See the list of essential fonts here.

One thing to remember is that if you use a font in your web pages or in your stationery that is not a standard part of windows, and the person viewing the page or stationery does not have that font installed, they will not see that font. They will see, instead, their default font which is normally Times New Roman. The only people that can view the page or stationery in the font you used to design it are people that have that particular font installed. Comic Sans is not my favorite font but it's a standard part of Windows and everyone has it. And I like it better than Times New Roman by a long shot! It was the best of what I had to  pick from according to my taste. You may love Times New Roman!

Fonts are small files, but when you start loading more and more fonts on your hard drive, they do start to take up hard drive space; and also too many fonts can slow down the loading of certain programs that use fonts. Programs ( Word-processing Programs, Email Programs, Graphics/Photo Programs) load fonts as they start up, and the more fonts you have the longer it takes to load them. Also you can install a corrupt font that may stop programs from running. If a program freezes or quits when it is loading fonts, then it is a good chance the program does not like a certain font. You will have to find the bad font and uninstall it.

FONT MANAGERS AND INSTALLERS
There are free programs available on the internet to manage your fonts and if you think you are a font nut or fanatic like me you may want to get one. Even if you aren't a fontaholic, it's good to get a handle on your fonts.

You should not have too many fonts in the windows font folder. I have been asked why a few times and I realized I didn't answer that question here. The reason why is the more fonts you have there, the longer it takes your computer to reboot and it really bogs down the opening and operation of many programs. In WinXP there is no limit on the number of fonts you can install but the older operating systems would have a limit. But even in WinXP, you shouldn't install too many fonts for the above reason.

This is how I avoid installing too many fonts in Windows.  I use a little freeware program called Font Loader. It's now been incorporated into a free program called ShellTools. You can get it here. This program puts the control of your fonts into the right-click menu (the little menu you get whenever you right-click on a file or folder). This makes managing your fonts very easy, and ensures you won't have too many fonts clogging up your windows font folder or slowing down the loading of your programs as they load your fonts. This program only puts a shortcut to the font into your windows font folder, freeing up resources and ensuring that windows starts faster and your programs load faster and run better. Just install Font Loader following the directions and make sure you put in the supplied password (including the ! at the end of the password). It's freeware but it needs the password to run. Make sure when you install it, that you say yes to adding it to the windows shell. After you install it, the best thing for you to do would be to check the list of fonts essential to windows, listed here. Take all of the fonts not listed as essential to windows and move them to another folder you created, you can call it My Fonts. Do not, under any circumstances, call it "Fonts" as windows may, and probably will, see it as the Windows font folder. Now make another folder and call it Installed Fonts.

Any font you want to reinstall, move it from your My Fonts folder to your Installed Fonts folder, highlight them all by clicking on Control-A, both keys at the same time. Now just right click on the highlighted fonts and when the right-click menu pops up, click on install fonts. This will install them. Since windows only has a shortcut to these fonts in the windows font folder, make sure that if you change the name of the fonts or the folder they are in, you reinstall them, or windows won't be able to find them. These fonts, since they are, in a way, installed, will be available even after you reboot your computer.

TEMPORARILY LOAD FONTS
Another thing FontLoader puts in the right-click menu is load or unload. This only makes the font available to all your programs, in the same way installing does, but only till you restart your computer, then they are not available to your programs again until you right-click and either install or load them again.

Another way to make fonts available to you temporarily is to go to the font file, double-click on it with the left mouse button, which will make the font file open up. Just minimize it and you will have that font available to you until you close the little font window. You will have to restart the program you want to use it in to make it available to that program.

FONT RENAMERS
I use a wonderful font renamer called FontRenamer, it's on version 2.1.6 right now, created by Philip Engel, and can be found here (it's listed as RedEar's FontRenamer). I couldn't find a link for it and I was hosting it here, but Phil wrote me himself with the new link and he told me that he tends to update at the end of every calendar quarter. He just informed me that v2.1.6 is just out (June 2008). It's a tiny program that you don't even need to install. Just put it where you want it and run the exe file.
Thanks Phil, wonderful product you have there and it's fantastic that you still share it as freeware!
It will change the names of all your fonts to the correct names, so instead of seeing ba____.ttf it will change it to the correct full name. This works on all True Type fonts, the ones you will normally see, with the ttf extension. It also works for Open Type fonts (otf) and Type 1 fonts (pfb and related files). In the options you can allow the option to rename Bitmap (fon) and Adobe Illustrator and encapsulated Postscript files (ai and eps) but in the help files he mentions you have to be careful when you do this. But the main fonts you will run into and use are the ttf, otf and Type 1 fonts.
Never use this program in your windows font folder or your system won't recognize the fonts in there and your windows may crash or some programs won't work. Use this program in any of the other font folders you made yourself - My Fonts or Installed Fonts (never call the folder you make yourself "Fonts" or it will confuse Windows. One thing to remember is what I mentioned before, if you change the name of the font, windows can't find it, so after running a font renamer in your fonts folder, make sure to reinstall your fonts by right-clicking (if you use Font Loader or another right click font loader).  I use FontRenamer all the time, as it is very hard to find a font at times if it is called some weird name. Another great freeware font renaming program is called TTRenamer. You can get it here.

FONT VIEWERS
There are many freeware font viewers. Just type free font viewer into a search engine such as Google and you will find many of them. My favorite and the one I use all of the time is X-Fonter. I see that the home site of X-Fonter now offers only shareware. I found an older, freeware version, which works just as good, at this site. Some other good ones are The Font Thing, Font Lister, AMP Font Viewer, Font Xplorer (made by the same company that made  Font Loader), to name just a few. Just click on any of those program names and it will take you to the website where they can be obtained. If they are no longer available at that site, again, just do a search in a search engine for them. If they are not at these links, or these links don't open up, I won't know where to find them either.

FONT GROUPS
As a side note, there are some great groups where you can get fonts, check my links page for the fonts groups I belong to. Also there are newsgroups where you can obtain fonts such as alt.binaries.font. I am new to newsgroups myself so can't answer any questions about them, but I fall back on the classic answer I always give, type it into a search engine and do the research. There is a lot of free and great information out there on the net. When I am looking for a font, my first resource is always to type it into the Google search engine in this manner "font" first (without the quotes) then the name of the font. You can often find it that way.