ScanFont 3.13 is the only one I use.

Heron2001, sometimes the font designer asks to have their font removed from dafont, for any of a number of reasons.

In this case, I believe badnewsdee has the wrong name for the font he's looking for, As far as I could determine, there is no font, free, commercial, or shareware, named 'Theres a sign head 3", or similar. It's quite possible that the font he's looking for is still here, but he doesn't know its' correct name.

Bell Bottom Laser is by Lorvad. His/her/their dafont page is:

http://www.dafont.com/author.php?author=220

There could be a read me doc in one of those other fonts, but I would doubt you would find any contact info. Bell Bottom Laser was made in 1991, and may well be based on a font made previous to that.

http://www.dafont.com/forum/read/752/cannot-open-file

tazek65, I had this same problem, until recently. One or both of the following actions should correct the problem for you:

1) Upgrade to a more current version of your .zipping/unzipping application. I had had the same version of Winrar installed for several years, and it worked fine, except for certain .zip files here at dafont. I recently upgraded to the latest version of Winrar, (3.93), and I no longer have any problem opening dafont .zips. Note that, if you are upgrading software, you may have to uninstall the previous version first, (that's the preferable way to do it). In some cases, you can install a new version, and the install wizard will upgrade the currently installed version. If your unzipping tool will not allow you to upgrade in that manner, you will get an error message,

2) Restart your computer. In a small number of cases, I had problems opening dafont .zips if my computer had been running for several consecutive days. If you have up to date unzipping tools installed, try doing a restart, and see if your .zip file will download properly.

Hope this helps,

~bito

Near the top of the page you should see some links:

Themes Authors Tools Submit a Font
New Fonts Top Help Forum

Click on the Themes link. In the Script category, click on the Calligraphy link. If there's something here that would be appropriate for your tattoo, that's probably where you would find it.

~bito

I did a search, (my own font collection, and a web search using google and metacrawler), and there's no record of a font by such a name. If you found it here, chances are it's still here, you just need to know the correct name of the font. If you can describe it, (ie: alphabet or dingbat/picture font; serif/sans serif; distinguishing characteristics, etc.), then someone may be able to help you. If you still have, or may still have, the font on your computer, you could try doing am internal search of all of your .ttf files, and if you find it that way, you won't have to be helped by anyone here.

Napapiiri is a free font by Petra Heidorn, who uses the alias CybaPee. She is the webmistress at TypOasis:

http://www.moorstation.org/typoasis/typoasis1.htm

(this link is listed as 'site' next to the designer's name on the Napapiiri page)

If you don't know this site, you should give it a thorough look. Even though nothing new has been added in almost three years, this is still one of the Internet's best resources for free fonts.

Designers showcased at TypOasis:

http://www.moorstation.org/typoasis/designers.htm

You don't need to ask permission to use a font that is designated as free, but if you want to contact Petra, her e-mail is cybapee@joice.net (the contact link is at the '@' symbol at the top of the Typoasis home page).

"Strange though that Miss Claude set restricted license embedding in a free font ..." - koeiekat

I checked through some of my older fonts that have read me documents, isolated the designers that were offering freeware or equivelent* (*ie: e-mailware or postcardware, for example), and there weren't many that restricted embedding, and most of these were primarily dingbat font designers.

Notable freeware designers whose fonts do not allow embedding: Rev Josh Wilhelm, Ben Nathan, abecedarienne, Alli Paterson, Dani Foster Herring, Denise Clendenon/Ozmee, Dieter Schumacher, Jim Fordyce, Listemagarens, Mike Gaines, Patrick Broderick/Roto Design, Shrine of Isis, Vin Rowe, Nikos Goulandris, antavania, and Eduardo Recife, (to whom every grungy script designer owes a huge debt of gratitude)

Most of these fonts are from the late 1990's/ early 2000's, as is AlphaWood. I think most, if not all, were made with Fontographer, which was pretty much the only choice at the time.

~bito

I'm pretty sure that all of her fonts are free, so you don't need to ask her permission to use it.

On the other hand, I checked AlphaWood and several of her other fonts, and the embedding setting is 'Embedding is not allowed' for all of them. If you can get her consent to embed the font, it's not difficult to change the settings.

Try contacting the designer, Melle Claude, through her website:

http://clofont.free.fr/


Her e-mail address is on a subpage of her site:

http://clofont.free.fr/pres.htm clo_web@lycos.fr

As far as I know, all of her fonts are freeware.

~bito

Jason, FontLab is a company, not a piece of software. when you mention FontLab, I think you mean Studio5, (or Studio4). I use ScanFont 3.13, which is also from FontLab, but it is a very different app. FontLab also makes BifFonter, (which I wouldn't recommend to anyone), and the New ScanFont5, which is a plug-in for Studio5. The .vfb project files from ScanFont can be imported into Studio5.

@ d[esign]:
"That'd be very sad... Maybe if they made an online game like "Download the Font" it wouldn't be so sad; download a copy of a font as many times as you can against the clock to win the golden EULA and make a font author rich through Adsense revenue (patent pending)."

That's the purpose of many 'cookies', so web sites can track the number of unique views by ISP, when calculating advertising rates based on traffic.

You need to extract the font from the .zip and install it, before you can use it in a document or other app. The .zip file's purpose is to compress the file for faster download, and to allow for multiple files to be included within the same .zip file, where applicable.

Read the FAQ, (Frequently Asked Questions), in the Help section, for additional basic questions.

http://www.dafont.com/faq.php

Don't mind the cat. I think he was dislodging a hairball.

d[esign], I find that my download numbers usually increase on each of Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, then they start to decline on Thursdays and Fridays, and then they drop off markedly on the weekend, then the cycle repeats. My guesses for the sharp peaks on your graph:

1) Numbers for most people probably go up or down significantly on the days when new fonts are posted. Obviously brand new fonts will have a major spike within 1-3 days, but the older catalogue will usually increase as well when a designer adds something new.

2) If you are referenced on a prominent blog, that will help download numbers for at least a couple of weeks.

3) If one of your fonts places highly in the 'Top fonts' category, it can tend to stay there, because I think many visitors browse that way instead of my Newest fonts or other search terms.

4) Adding a banner ad might make a spike, but not that much.

5) Having older fonts added to updates can easily create spikes like that, but the effect would probably be short term.

6) I wonder if those who have been reviewed in the 'looking at each other's fonts thread experienced any fluctuation of download figures afterwards. I would think the 'Up to Wednesday, down until Sunday' trend would be a much bigger factor.

I think the graph itself is a bit much, though. It reminds me of when I used to recalculate my FreeCell winning percentage every few games, to see what percentage of the remaining games I would have to win to top 84% by the end of the current hundred games.

The worst case scenario is that a lot of different people were having problems with downloaded .zips, so they had to download your same font multiple times to get a good copy. I hope there isn't anyone out there who is downloading their own font, over and over, just to move up on the Top Fonts page. That would just be fooling yourself.

Who's Next?

There are some people, whom I won't name, who update the same font every couple of weeks, just to move up to a top page. That's frowned upon. My AmyBats font went to updates when I added font #5, and FixCystNeon went to updates after one day, because I had put the Euro symbol in the wrong place, and Rodolphe fixed it for me. As you can see from the download figures for that font, it didn't help me get many extra downloads, but I think the figures will go up when I complete my banner ad, which is quite elaborate.

Awesome numbers for Defused, vinz, but that would be a drop in the bucket for Billy A. He's got 230,000 for Ginga on fontspace. To extrapolate a dafont total from that, multiply by 20-30.

I won't be starting any kind of website anytime soon. I need all of my bandwidth for video file sharing. I'll stick to reviewing free/shareware/free for personal use fonts, and maybe some of the other people reading this thread will pick up the gauntlet and review commercial fonts. I'm already doing more than my share in this thread.

If I do ever make a website, it will be metaphasebrothel dot com. metaphase isn't a real word, but it sounds like one. The metaphase brothel would be a place where transdimensional beings hang out while travelling through hyperspace. Metaphase Brothel is an anagram of my name, as is "breatheshempalot", which was used as the creator for my Bewarethefriendlystranger font. I guess I was predestined to make fonts, because another anagram of my name is alphabet theorems.

Find the anagrams of your own name here:

http://www.mbhs.edu/~bconnell/cgi-bin/anagram.cgi

~bito

Mine, through June 29:

AmyBats (5 fonts): 53,767 since Feb, 2008
FixCystNeon: 4,583 since May, 2010
FrazettaBats1: 46,368 since May, 2008
HaydenPanettiereBats: 32,286 since May, 2008
KleinKarpets: 122,011 since Jan, 2008
ObeyGalleria: 27,645 since Jan, 2010
ObeyPatterns: 33,150 since Jan, 2010
ObeyRevolution: 35,835 since Jan, 2010
ObeyRockers: 31,886 since Jan, 2010
ObeyTyrant: 18,415 since Jan, 2010
Obey Series 1 (12 fonts): 8,222 since Jan, 2010
Obey Series 2 (10 fonts): 16,050 since Jan, 2010

jroces: Put the font in the directory C:\Windows\Fonts, (assuming you are using the C: drive), or alternatively, in the Fonts folder in your Control Panel, (both locations are the same place), then try it in CS3. If you're still having problems, post again.

~bito

@ d[esign]: To put graphics in your post, do the following:

1) Type [ img ], but don't have any spaces between the brackets and the letters. I have to type it this way for the text to display properly in the forum post. The img can be in upper or lower case, and these are the square brackets between the P and the backslash on your keyboard.

2) Type, or copy/paste, the url of your image. There should be no space between the right bracket and the H in http.

3 Following the url of the image, type [ /img ], again, with no spaces between the end of the image address and the left bracket, and with no spaces between the left bracket and the forward slash, and no spaces between the l in url and the right bracket.

If you want to include a hyperlink to an Internet page, follow the same procedure above, but substitute url for img.

I looked at your commercial fonts, but I won't be doing reviews of anyone's commercial fonts, because they would and should be judged on a completely different basis. For a free or shareware font, my decision is "is it worth the bandwidth and the diskspace?" For a commercial font, the decision is "is it worth the money?" All of my reviews so far have taken into account amateur or semi-pro status, and the expectations of that level of expertise. When fonts are offered for sale, their quality should be judged against the standards of other commercial fonts. I hope some people will give you reviews of your commercial work. Unfortunately, I won't be one of them.

I am in no way an expert in fonts. I don't even read the font identification forum, and there probably aren't more than 100 fonts that I can identify just by a text sample, (but I could probably identify the designer on many more, just not the font names). I just decided to start doing reviews because kirksucks wanted some feedback, per the first post in the thread, and nobody else was doing it, so I took the initiative. My reviews are simply that, what I think of the work by the people who have asked for feedback. If you read all of them, you'll know that I'm not fond of hand printed fonts, mostly because there are already too many of these. I also have expectations that more recent work will be equal to, or better in quality than previous work, which is why I review them in sequence, from most recent. Like most of us, I google my own work every so often. The only online reviews of my Obey series are "Dude has waaay too much time on his hands-" and something on a Croatian blog.

Here's something interesting that a guy named Dennis Jansen did with my AmyBats fonts:

http://sharebee.com/158a5243

That series was surprisingly popular, although they are technically among my worst fonts. I think I spent about a day on each of those fonts. By contrast, I often spent multiple days on single glyphs in the Obey series.

Very briefly: Would I purchase any of your fonts? No. Would I buy any of my own, if someone else had made them? No. Do I own a lot of commercial fonts? Yes. Did I buy any of them? No. Am I doing anything with them? No. I don't even own a printer, and I use Bookman Old Style for just about all of my MS Word documents.

I make fonts because I like to make fonts, and I make them for other people who collect fonts, because other people have made fonts that I collect. I would like to think that my fonts, (most of them, anyway), would be 'must haves' for dingbat font collectors, and anything beyond that is a bonus. I've probably got five or six GB of fonts that have never been extracted from their .zip archives, including yours. I'm at the point where I don't know what I have anymore, and it takes Windows search twenty minutes to go through the folder with my unsorted archives, so I probably have multiple copies of thousands of fonts. If I win the lottery, I'll hire a summer student to sort and label everything after September, 2008. I was pretty well organized, until then. Once I started to make my own, I had much less time to sort and label other people's stuff. I still download the new stuff here and at fontspace, but I actual install only a small fraction of those.