I found it here, the price looks great, and I can use some of the fonts (but some look too “commerical” for much use for me). There’s a whiff of ‘too good to be true’ here – I mean, 8000 TT fonts for 10 bucks, marked down from 40? C’mon!
Scam? Or is it really that good?
Probably not a scam. Since you can find thousands of truetype fonts free on the Internet, they’re probably having trouble selling them for $40.
I got a 4000 TT font CD for Christmas and tried to use some to spruce up my PC’s appearance. Evidently, the fonts I have won’t work that way.
Beware about installing all these fonts on the system. Too many installed fonts are a classic cause of major system bog downs when using word processing or brochure etc image editing apps.
Yeah, you can get them free on the net. Chances are you won’t use many of them & also, some versions of Windows can’t handle a lot of fonts.
It’s certainly not a scam, but it’s definitely not as good as it sounds.
For one thing, if this fonts CD is like the ones I’ve got, you won’t be getting 8,000 completely different fonts. What you’ll be getting is several different variations of the same typeface.
For example, take the font Serif. Most likely, that will include Serif Regular, Serif Italic, Serif Bold, Serif Italic Bold, Serif Compacted, Serif Extended, Serif Compacted Italic, Serif Extended Italic, and so on. There may be as many as six or seven fonts based on the basic Serif design. They all belong to the Serif font family, but each variation is counted towards the 8,000.
So the 8,000 number is a bit of a misrepresentation. There’s 8,000 fonts, sure, but as far as distinguishably different typeface families, you’re probably getting only a fourth or fifth of that. My 3,000 fonts CD, for example, has only 500 distinct typefaces, but each has six variations.
I just took a look at the Font Showcase link on that page, and there are just under 100 font samples there. I strongly suspect that those are a good majority, if not all, of the fonts you’ll be getting on the CD.
In addition to the one-for-price-of-six thing, some of the font familes themselves may closely resemble one another. In another (particularly poor) CD of mine, about half of the fonts looked alike. The samples printed on the CD cover were the typefaces that were clearly different from the rest. But of the 500 or so fonts in that CD, I had only 100 truly unique fonts.
As RealityChuck and handy have noted, you can find tons of free fonts on the Internet. However, I don’t recommend that if you don’t have a strong tolerance for flashy banners and pop-up windows. Many free fonts sites, especially the portal sites, have way too many of both. It can also take a while to wade through links and find fonts you like.
On the other hand, if you know what kind of font you want (dingbat, uncial, blackletter, etc.), then the Internet’s a damn fine resource. 
But if you don’t know what you want, or if it’s a pain-free font-shopping experience you want, then those CDs are the way to go.
I also echo astro’s don’t-install-too-many-fonts warning. Pick a handful of your favourites, or only the ones you’ll need, and install just those. Remember, you have a CD to back you up; you don’t need to install them all, and you can always reinstall a font or two later if you have to.
Happy fonting!
I believe Windows can handle having about 500 fonts intalled simultaneously before it chokes.
Apparantly there’s a limit as to how many entries there can be on any branch of the System Registry.
“I believe Windows can handle having about 500 fonts intalled simultaneously before it chokes.”
It depends on the version of windows.
What about Windows 98(FE)? I am sitting at 495 fonts and have a bunch more that I haven’t actually installed. I want to install more fonts. I am strangely fascinated with having many, many fonts on my system. Am I doomed?
At the moment, KKBattousai’s got about 1,020 fonts installed. He’s also running Windows 98. So Boscibo, don’t worry; if anything happens as a result of the font overload, it should happen here first. I’ll let you know if any disaster strikes.
On Macs, I think the limit is128 font suitcases. At least I think it still is; I don’t know what changes, if any, were made on that past Mac OS 8. 128 doesn’t sound like much, but you can put a lot of fonts into a single suitcase. And as far as individual font files, I don’t think there’s any real limit.
1.Sometimes, the Font folder (/Windows/fonts) forgets that it’s a Font folder and becomes a regular,
garden-variety folder instead. “Repair Font Folder” restores the Font Folder’s functionality (say that three
times fast).
Under certain conditions, the following font related error messages may appear on a user’s system:
The Windows® desktop may occasionally display fonts other than the System fonts, and may have a
distorted appearance on the desktop. This is normally due to a large amount of fonts installed on a
system. In addition, the following error message may be generated when attempting to install additional
fonts: "The font file may be corrupt or damaged".
The error message "No font list found" when attempting to launch Windows '95.
Etc…
Thanks AudreyK and handy
Okay. Thanks so much to those who’ve replied. You’re right in the availability of free fonts; I think the problem before is that I never figured out how to unzip the durn things, but now that I have, I’d been able to locate at least 125 fonts I really like from various places around the internet. And by entering into my font folder via the Windows folder, I’d been able to delete at least as many fonts with bold, italics and bold italics variations. Now I have only a few more fonts that I started out with but I can proudly say I have more genuine variety.
Thanks for the help!
Askia
“Yep: 10 bucks for 8000 renamed fonts is still a rip-off”
Genuine variety? Not sure what you mean there. Maybe I sold the bold, italics, and other variations a little short when I said they count each toward the total number of fonts, but they’re not simply there to stretch the number. They’re actually better to use. Fonts whose names include Bold, Italic, Extended, Condensed, etc. are specifically redesigned variations of the original font. They are different from the type effects you’d get if you used, say, Word, to bold, italicize, extend, or condense your text. Times New Roman Bold, for example, will bear differences from Times New Roman with a computer-generated bolding effect under close examination. These differences don’t make much difference to the average computer user, but to dorky type purists like me, they’re everything.
Anyway, unless you’re pressed for disk space, or like to keep your Fonts folder lean and mean, there’s no reason to delete them.
It depends. If you found a font with even a tenth of that 8,000 for $10, but the fonts were good and nearly indistinguishable from their pedigreed Adobe or ITC or Linotype counterparts, it’d definitely would be worth the price. IMO, it’s not the name of the font or how many there are that matters; it’s the quality of the font and how much you like it that matters.