Use free fonts and images in your documents

The templates supplied with Microsoft Office and other office suites are a great way to give documents a polished look but they can be a little similar.

We are going to show you how to find and use fonts and images to make documents stand out from the crowd.

There are plenty of high-quality photos and illustrations that can be downloaded from the internet.

It is important to know what can and cannot be used, but once you are armed with this knowledge you can prepare impressive documents that look just as you want.

Let’s begin with fonts. Most people tend to stick to the default fonts in office suites. Fonts fall into four categories: serif, sans-serif, cursive and symbols.

Serif fonts have little flourishes on the ends of letters like Times New Roman.

Sans-serif fonts, such as the one you are reading, don’t have these flourishes. Cursive fonts mimic handwriting while symbol fonts such as Wingdings provide a range of symbols and graphics.

Trying out new fonts is fine but simply peppering a document with a range of unrelated fonts results in messy documents that are hard to read. Handwriting-style fonts in particular can be very difficult to read.

Used sparingly, though, perhaps in a single headline, they can add some distinction to a letter. Another downside of using strange fonts arises if you want to send the document to someone by email.

If the recipient’s PC doesn’t have the font you have used, their word processor will just substitute it with another, ruining your carefully considered design.

The solution to that problem is to save documents in the PDF format. Take a look at our video workshop Preserve document formatting using the PDF format for more help on this.

Before we look at how to find new fonts it’s worth thinking about how to get the many fonts you already have organised.

Using a font manager makes it quick and easy to compare and choose fonts and can help improve performance. Cfont Pro has two useful tools: it can compare fonts on screen and be used to install and uninstall fonts.