Most font publishers don’t give you full printouts of their fonts, so in order to evaluate which fonts you want to use, you need a template like the one we give you on this disk in both MacWrite 4.5 and Word 3.01 formats. All you have to do is select the entire template and then change the font in order to get a printout of every character a given font can produce, as well as samples of the sixteen possible type styles in that font.
But be aware that, when using a laser printer from most programs, the outline shadow variations look just the same as the shadow variations. (PageMaker is one exception.) This isn’t a problem on dot-matrix printers like the ImageWriter.
The shifted and unshifted symbols are shown in the order in which they appear on the keyboard, from left to right and top to bottom. Because the characters produced by the Option key (with and without the Shift key) don’t appear on the keyboard, I’ve set it up so that each row under the option keys and shift-option keys headings represents a row of keys. This makes it easy to find the symbol on the keyboard.
Although all fifteen type styles are shown at the bottom of the template (plain text is omitted because most of the rest of the template is in it), it makes sense to give yourself a bit more of a look at the three most useful ones: bold, italic and bold italic. So I’ve put the title (font and publisher) in bold italic, the type sizes in italic, and the subheads below the type sizes (unshifted symbols, shifted symbols, etc.) in bold. I’ve also underlined those subheads and the type sizes, so you can see how underlining looks with the font.
You may want to make the special characters or the style variations bigger, so you can see them better; with most fonts, the whole template will still fit on a page.
Each time you select the template and change it to a different font, you may have to readjust line breaks and even lop a few letters off some of the larger alphabets. That’s because fonts of the same nominal point size vary quite a bit in actual size, both in height and width.
When using the template for a bit-mapped font, it makes sense to only show the size(s) it’s actually supplied in, because scaled sizes of bit-mapped fonts generally look wretched. (The one exception to this rule is when a scaled size is exactly half of a supplied size.)
Most laser fonts have special characters for every possible slot. Bit-mapped fonts almost never do. When a bit-mapped font doesn’t have a given special character, it will produce the missing character box: (its appearance varies with the font, but it always looks pretty much like that). But it will only do that on a dot-matrix printer; laser printers won’t print the missing character box.
Needless to say, you should feel free to modify this template to fit your particular needs. If you often use different fonts, it’s a good idea to print out a template of each and put them in a loose-leaf notebook in alphabetical order, so you have them to refer to when you’re trying to decide what font to use.
