Anyone getting real work done on an iPad might need to add a font to their word processor or image creation app. The process is more complicated than it should be, but you can bring the huge numbers of fonts available for Mac or Windows to your tablet, too … if you know how.
I’ll walk you step-by-step through the installation.
You can have the most interesting Instagram post in the world, but the caption is still limited to the same fonts everyone else uses, and they don’t always communicate “fun.” If you want to add some excitement to the text on your social media profiles, messages and even your iOS device’s Home Screen, then you may want to try Fonts Art. A premium lifetime subscription to this awesome iOS app lets you add some new aesthetic flavor to your texts, and it’s on sale for $39.99.
Apple recently brought a bunch of awesome new fonts to macOS, but they’re not enabled by default. Here’s how to download them for free so that you can enjoy them inside almost any Mac app.
iOS 13 and iPadOS added official support for adding fonts to your iPhone and iPad. You’ve been able to do it for a while, using third-party apps that hack their way around the problem using software configuration profiles to install typefaces on your system.
And you can still use those. In fact, you may have to, as we’ll see in a moment. But now you can also install fonts from the App Store, as well as previewing them in a new built-in panel. Let’s take a look.
Adobe’s massive catalog of fonts is now available on iOS for the first time. You can use them inside any app that supports custom font APIs — so long as you’re running iOS 13.1.
Get started by downloading the Creative Cloud app today.
Surprisingly, iOS 13.1 is already in beta. It looks like Apple’s release strategy this year is to freeze the current beta version of iOS 13.0 in order to get it ready for the new iPhones expected on September 10. Meanwhile, Apple continues to test the next version, adding back some features removed during the beta period — Shortcuts automations, for example.
So, what other new (or revived) features will you find in iOS 13.1 beta 1?
The iPhone and iPad are usually great at making web pages easy to read, even when they have lots of small text. Double-tap on a column of text, and it automatically zooms to fill the screen. Double-tap it again and you’re back where you began.
But sometimes a page behaves badly. You see it often on Internet forums, or the mobile-friendly (!) version of Reddit, for example. The text is tiny, and runs from edge to edge. There’s no way to zoom in. Even if you turn your device on its side to make the screen wider, the text just reflows — the same tiny letters, but in even longer lines.
This weekend I got sick of this, and set out to find a way to increase the font size in Mobile Safari with a bookmarklet. It didn’t take long.
If you do any work with fonts on the Mac whatsoever, you will have run up against the font picker. It’s a piece of design that dates back to when the Mac only came with a black-and-white screen, and yet it’s still the only way to select a font on an Apple computer. That wouldn’t be so bad if it was a good design, but it’s not. The macOS font picker is little more than a drop-down menu. Worse, it’s a drop-down menu that changes every time you use it.
You can use the Mac’s font panel in some apps, but even then you’re faced with long and confusing lists.
Sam William Smith, a designer from Glasgow, Scotland, decided to do something about this. He completely redesigned the Mac font menu, and it’s great.
Most of use just use the fonts that come supplied with the iOS apps we use every day. If you use Pages, you get a ton of built-in typeface options. But what if you use a notes app by a smaller developer that hasn’t licensed a bunch of fonts for their app? What if you have a favorite font, or even a font you designed yourself, that you want to use on your iPhone or iPad? Or maybe you opened up a Microsoft Word document in Pages and got the dreaded “missing font” warning?
Then there’s good news, because you can quite easily install fonts on your system, and they can be used by any app that supports them.
What? Yes. AnyFont is a proper, available-in-the-App-Store iOS app that lets you install fonts system-wide, for use by any app that allows access to the full list of iOS system fonts. How does it manage this sandbox-skipping magic? Installation profiles.
Does the recent spat over Writer Pro and its software-patenting shenanigans leave you wishing you could use its beautiful Nitti Light font in a different developer’s app? Or are you so scarred by years of using Microsoft Word that you can’t concentrate unless you’re staring at a page of Times New Roman?
Fear not, friends, because The Soulmen have the answer. Hidden in the latest update to Daedalus Touch is a way to import any font you like. Yup, I’m talking about Comic Sans on iOS.
Remember Mac font managing apps? I do: I hated them. Extensis Suitcase caused more problems with my old G5 PowerMac than anything else, ever, and I was fairly conservative in my font use back when I worked as a designer.
Thankfully, Macs these days don’t need the user to manually switch fonts on and off: our computers are powerful enough to handle it. Which is why Bohemian Coding ditched its old Fontcase app and replaced it with the shiny new Fonts, an app that is dedicated to just organizing and looking at your fonts.
IOS Fonts is the most concisely-named website of the day. It shows you all the fonts available on your iOS device, lets you search them and even preview your chosen text in them. I love it… and yet I’m struggling to find any practical use for it.
I adjust fonts in different apps for OS X almost every day, so maybe I’m blowing this tiny tip out of proportion, but it’s one of the most useful things I’ve come across in weeks. Slide a little dot down to get a preview of the font, rather than having to look over at your document or image with each font change? It’s great!
Doing any design work? Creating an office newsletter, classroom report, or client brochure? Chances are you’ll be needing some fonts. The Mac may have ushered in the era of desktop publishing many moons ago, but we’re still at the mercy of our own (or our clients’) good taste or lack thereof.
If you’re trying to decide between different fonts for a particular project, you might want to print out a font sampler, which contains all the different fonts you are looking at in a nice, easily shared format. Font Book, the app that handles fonts on your Mac, can do this for you easily, at least in Mac OS X 10.7.3. Here’s how to make that happen.
Gotta alotta fonts installed on your Mac, but never know which you’d like to actually use in a document? Most apps show font previews on the formatting menu, but with Microsoft Word and some other apps many people turn off this feature because it massively increases start-up times. The solution is to create (and print off, if you wish) a font sample document that you can refer to whenever you want. This is very easily done on your Mac, as follows.