The Ubuntu font was released last year in August to everyone and it was definitely one of the best looking fonts I have come across. I also use the Ubuntu font extensively on my PC thanks to this handy trick to install Ubuntu font on Windows.

As I was redesigning the website to give a fresher look to it, I wanted to make use of the Ubuntu font for it. Unfortunately, it is not a web font yet modern web browsers won’t understand it.

However, you can use the Ubuntu font for your website or any webpage on the internet thanks to Google Web Fonts. In Google Chrome, you can also change the font of any website using a Google Chrome Extension called Google Font Directory.

To implement the Ubuntu font on your website or webpage, head over to this page and click on the link which says "Use this font". On this page you will find code and instructions to use the Ubuntu font on your website. Just copy over the code to your webpage and you can specify your font as "Ubuntu"

Google Web Fonts also has several other fonts which can be used on any websites or webpages, head over to http://www.google.com/webfonts to browse the entire collection.

P.S. Don’t forget to tell me what you think of the new Techie Buzz design.

A font is that exclusive property of design, that not only relays emotion but also defines style. For designers, getting the font right is very important because the right fonts can help convey the mood of the information without having the reader to read the text. If you’re a designer and find it difficult to select the right font from the tens or hundreds of fonts installed on your system, Wordmark.it, a free web service can help you achieve just that, easily.

The page over at Wordmark.it loads all the fonts installed on your system, and displays a sample using a word or phrase that you provide. Once all the fonts are loaded which takes no more than a few seconds you can increase or decrease the size of the sample text, or flip the background-foreground colors, in case you need white text on black background. You can also single out fonts you like by clicking over them and viewing them all later using the filter provided.

Wordmark.it

This is gonna be a quickie. If you’ve installed the latest Ubuntu 10.10, loved the new default Ubuntu font and want to have the same font available on your other systems running Windows or Mac, you may look no further. The Ubuntu font, which is actually a family of fonts, is not only royalty free and open source, but also gratis. It is an open-type ttf based font family, designed by renowned font foundry Dalton Maag, which is based in London.

If you’ve come to believe that Ubuntu is bad at typography, this is the moment where you should give it another chance.

Download the Ubuntu Font [Take the link for the zip file, in the second β line]

India recently got a symbol for the currency Indian Rupee. Though there are several fonts for the Indian Rupee Symbol, none of them have been integrated into any operating system yet. However, there is a specialized keyboard for the Indian Rupee symbol.

Ubuntu was working on the Ubuntu Font licensing, and now that it has been approved, they have already uploaded it to the archive. However, the good news is that it gained the Indian Rupee Symbol recently and will now be available by default in the upcoming Ubuntu 10.10.

So if you have been waiting for Ubuntu 10.10, here is another reason to shift to it.

(Source: KDE Developers)

As a designer or website developer, you would want to try and vary the fonts you use on a webpage to get the best typography for it, however, doing this through CSS could take a little effort.

Google Font Directory provides users with several fonts which they can use on their website by embedding JavaScript code on your website. The fonts provided through the directory are open source and will be served through Google’s servers.

Google Font API Tester is a Google Chrome extension which will allow you to test the fonts made available through Google Font Directory on any website without having to make any physical changes to the code.

Techie Buzz Verdict

The Google Font API Tester Google Chrome extension is a pretty neat extension which will save developers and designers some work when they want to make use of fonts from the Google Font Directory, however, this extension is not useful for testing other fonts.

My advise to the developer would be to extend this extension and allow users to somehow also use other popular fonts currently being used on websites, that way it could be used by people who want to test websites with fonts like Arial, Verdana and so on without having to make physical changes to the code.

Techie Buzz Rating: 3/5

Downloads for this post – Download Google Font API Tester

The Indian Rupee Symbol has been finalized and has made History. However, typing the Indian Rupee symbol is not possible yet, because of its uniqueness and it not being part of the keyboard alphabets yet.

Nevertheless, you can always download Indian Rupee Symbol wallpapers for your desktop. These wallpapers can be downloaded and used on PC, Mac and Linux based desktops. However, if you want to type the Indian Rupee symbol on your PC, you can now do it use the Indian Rupee   Font.

First of all you will need to download the Indian Rupee Symbol from here and install it to your PC. You can read our guide on installing fonts in Linux or also learn how to install fonts on Windows and Mac (see end of article). Once you have installed the Rupee Font, you need to select the font and press the “`” key on the keyboard to insert the rupee symbol into documents.

Right now, the Indian Rupee Symbol will only be viewable on PCs which have the Indian Rupee font installed. You can always create images of the symbol to use on your website. I have embedded some tutorials on how to type the Indian Rupee symbol on your computer after you have installed the form.

WinFontsView is a nifty utility which can be used to view all the installed fonts in your Windows System. It is a portable application and thus require no installation. You can carry this small utility in a usb stick and use it on multiple computers.

We have earlier covered some font utilities for windows which includes viewing Windows fonts with Fonticate and some free font viewers for Windows. If you want to print a particular font, read our earlier post.

Here is how the fonts window looks in WinFontsView

The application shows up to 5 samples for each installed font in different sizes.You can view the fonts in bold, italics and underline styles. You can also export the list of fonts into an html file. To view the fonts in other languages, go to advanced options or press F8.

Also check out some interesting websites where you can find free fonts for Windows and Mac.

Techie-Buzz Verdict

WinFontsView is good if you are interested in just seeing the fonts installed in your computer. Does a good job but I would like to see more functions in the upcoming versions.(e.g exporting or importing fonts )

Techie-Buzz rating: 2/5 (Average).

Many of you may have downloaded free fonts for Windows and Mac. However, previewing fonts, before you use them can be quite a pain. Of course, you can view all the installed fonts on your computer using several tools.

Also Read: 15000+ Hand picked fonts for downloads

However, the best way to view fonts would be when they are printed. Print my fonts allows you to preview the fonts and print it to a paper using your custom text.

Print My Fonts is a portable software, just download the zip file and double-click the preview and print the font.

Note: The best way to save the nature, is to go green. While using this application may help, please print wisely.

Download PrintMyFont

Installing Fonts on Ubuntu has been covered earlier in the post titled How to install fonts on Ubuntu. But, a font manager along with this would go a step further to a better UI on Ubuntu Linux. A font manager lets us group fonts, tag them and put them under categories else that simply viewing them.

Font Manager

Font Matrix is a cool application with which we can easily manage fonts on a Ubuntu system.

The Font management can be done for the complete system as a root user as well as for individual user accounts. Font Matrix uses the freetype engine to render fonts and the QT framework to provide the frontend for the application which is quite user friendly and well built as is evident from the screenshot.

Another great feature of Font Matrix is labeling of fonts, and tagging them which makes it a font manager and not just a simple font viewer.

With no built in application for managing, labeling and tagging fonts in Ubuntu, font manager equals it’s windows counterparts to a good extent and is a must have application for Ubuntu Linux.

To download Font Matrix for any Debian based system, visit the download page here : Font Matrix Download

PimpYourFont is an online collection of over 15,000 free truetype fonts available for download. All listed fonts are manually selected from hundreds of thousands of fonts available on the web.   The site lets you browse   fonts alphabetically or simply   search by keyword. You can preview each font by typing some text and also see how it would appear in different sizes. PimpYourFont also provides information about the Font Style and Font Family of each font.

Fonts are nicely classified in various categories like Arabic, Old School, Western, Retro, Monospaced, Pixelated, Digital e.t.c.  Additionally you can check out top-100 fonts, skim through the recently uploaded fonts, rate fonts and see how they have been rated by other users.