Fonts con­trol the vi­sual ap­pear­ance of all text ren­dered by a com­puter. Every word you read on screen—whether through your word proces­sor, web browser, or mo­bile app—uses a font. As does every word that the com­puter prints.

Fonts are not pro­grams, like your word proces­sor or web browser. They’re sta­tic data files, like MP3s or PDFs. Each font file con­tains in­for­ma­tion that de­fines the shapes of the let­ters, plus spac­ing, kern­ing, Open­Type fea­tures, and so on. There’s one font file for each style in the fam­ily. (A style means one vi­sual vari­ant, like ro­man, italic, bold, etc.)

The best pro­fes­sional fonts are bet­ter than any sys­tem font or free font—and in ways that every­one, even those who think they don’t have an eye for ty­pog­ra­phy, can ap­pre­ci­ate. Though you can’t have the world’s best ty­pog­ra­phers lay out your doc­u­ments, you can in­cor­po­rate their work into your doc­u­ments with a font.

Right. But as a writ­ing tool, they’re a great value. You can get a top-qual­ity pro­fes­sional-font fam­ily for un­der $200. These fonts will im­prove the ap­pear­ance of every doc­u­ment you cre­ate. And un­like most tech pur­chases, they don’t break, they don’t go ob­so­lete in three years, and they don’t need to be up­graded monthly (if ever). Best of all, you can put them to work with­out learn­ing any­thing new. What other hard­ware or soft­ware can you say that about?

Re­ally, the hard­est thing about us­ing pro­fes­sional fonts is choos­ing from the thou­sands avail­able. But once you nar­row them down—by prac­ti­cal re­quire­ments, by cost, by per­sonal taste—you’ll have a rea­son­ably small set to choose from.

Since this is an in­tro­duc­tion to the world of pro­fes­sional fonts, on the next pages, I’ve taken some fonts that you’re likely fa­mil­iar with—namely, com­mon sys­tem fonts—and cho­sen some pro­fes­sional fonts that would make good alternatives.

Also keep in mind that nearly every font you see in a book, news­pa­per, or mag­a­zine can be li­censed for your own use. To fig­ure out the name of the font you’re look­ing at, see iden­ti­fy­ing fonts in the appendix.

Fonts are sold on­line. You can buy fonts ei­ther di­rect from the web­sites of font de­sign­ers or from re­tail­ers who sell fonts from many de­sign­ers. There’s not much dif­fer­ence in price, which is in the range of $20 to 50 per style. Af­ter you pay, you down­load the fonts and in­stall them. For body text, the core styles you will want are ro­man, italic, bold, bold italic, and ro­man small caps.

Font names are con­fus­ing, even for pro­fes­sional ty­pog­ra­phers. Cer­tain font names (e.g., Myr­iad, Min­ion) are trade­marked, so their names are dis­tinct. But names of long-dead ty­pog­ra­phers (e.g., Baskerville, Gara­mond, Caslon) are not pro­tected, and their names get in­cluded in many font names whether the as­so­ci­a­tion is apt or not. These names con­note noth­ing about the qual­ity of the font or how it ap­pears on the page. For in­stance, Stem­pel Gara­mond and ITC Gara­mond are as sim­i­lar as Bart Simp­son and Lisa Simp­son. To fur­ther com­pli­cate the pic­ture, some fonts with trade­marked names (e.g., Hel­vetica, Palatino) have been re­vised and re­leased un­der slightly dif­fer­ent names (e.g., Hel­vetica Neue, Palatino Nova).

Once in­stalled, new fonts show up in your font menu along with the usual sys­tem fonts. Use them the same way.

Fonts are soft­ware. Like most soft­ware, fonts are of­fered un­der a li­cense. Fonts are usu­ally li­censed per user. The most com­mon way font li­censes are vi­o­lated is when some­one buys a sin­gle-user li­cense and then shares it with oth­ers in the or­ga­ni­za­tion. Please—be a good ty­po­graphic cit­i­zen. Buy the num­ber of li­censes you need and fol­low the li­cense terms.

I have no fi­nan­cial stake in any of the fonts shown here, ex­cept the ones I de­signed—Eq­uity, Cen­tury Supra, Valkyrie, Con­course, Trip­li­cate, and Ad­vo­cate.