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Font Fanatics
You know you're a fontaholic when:1 - You always check your favorite "font of the day" site (or a.b.f., comp.fonts, etcetera) to see what's new before you check your e-mail.
2 - More than two-thirds of your bookmarked URLs are font-related websites.
3 - You keep complete backups of your fonts stored in at least two places, off-site.
4 - You still worry about losing your fonts when your computer crashes.
5 - You download a font you already have just in case the existing copy gets corrupted.
6 - You download a clone font as well as the original just in case there are some subtle differences that you might need to take advantage of someday.
7 - You have every single font with letters partially covered with snow.
8 - You keep all of those snow-covered fonts installed all year long.
9 - You post a denial within seconds if you see the phrase too many fonts in any newsgroup. If such a message is posted in a fonts newsgroup, you personally visit the idiot responsible and try to knock some sense into him/her.
10 - Your children are named Gill, Stanley, Frederick, Sumner, and Arial.
11 - Your dog is named Goudy and your cat is named Baskerville. The stray cat that has started hanging around lately is beginning to answer to New Baskerville.
12 - You try to convince those members of your family who, incredibly, don' t even know what a font is, that you want your nickname to be "Uncial" from now on.
13 - It takes nearly three full toner cartridges to print sample pages of all of your fonts.
14 - You print them all anyway.
15 - You can recognize instantly the subtle differences between Helvetica, Swiss, Geneva, and Arial, even on a 14-inch monitor at 72 dpi with font smoothing disabled.
16 - You know all of the reasons why Palatino is better than Book Antiqua and Zapf Calligraphic BT, yet you keep Book Antiqua and Zapf Calligraphic BT installed, "just in case".
17 - You can discuss for hours the differences between the digitized versions of Garamond, Granjon, Jannon, and Sabon, and whether the TrueType or Type 1 version is more faithful to the original punches. (And don't even get started on whether the Mac or PC versions are better.)
18 - You feel pity when some poor newbie mentions in a post that they have "only" 4,000 fonts.
19 - You have a bumper sticker that proclaims, "He who dies with the most fonts wins."
20 - You spent nearly an hour hand-kerning the above bumper sticker.
21 - When you check alt.binaries.fonts more than once a day.
22 - When you check alt.binaries.fonts through more than one source, so you'll be sure not to miss anything.
23 - When you buy a second hard drive - bigger than 10 GB - so that you can store your font collection "on-line."
24 - When you copy fonts to a floppy, you make two copies so that in case one of the floppies goes bad, you won't loose the font (even though you know you have other floppy-copies, and it's on at least one CD-ROM in your collection).
25 - When you have trouble getting the kerning just right, on your GROCERY LIST.
26 - When you download fonts you don't even like, because they're FONTS .
27 - When you buy a commercial four-drawer commercial file cabinet to hold the sample pages you have printed from your font library ... and it's *full*!28 - You spend more time looking at how the name of the car in front of you is written rather than where you're going
29 - You have 3 or more fonts on your computer that are fantasy or science fiction languages/symbols that you can't read, but hey... they look cool. "Well it's not my fault, they were posted on a.b.f.!"
30 - You're the only one you know who thinks being able to have only a few HUNDRED fonts on Windows 98 is a problem.
31 - You agonize for hours over which font to remove from your maxed-out system in order to install the cool new font you found today.
32 - You visit a Font-of-the-Day site for two and a half months before finding a font you haven't seen before.
33 - You try to explain to your friends why you like fonts so much, and it only makes you sound geekier.
34 - You truly believe Ray Larabie [Dieter Steffmann, Apostrophie (\')] is a GOD.
35 - You state with conviction that you can never have enough calligraphy fonts.
36 - You don't have any outline fonts on your computer when you already have their solid versions because the outline versions would only take space away for other fonts.
37 - You can often point out lettering you see in advertisements or logos by their font names; as in "Hey, that's Colonial Uncial!"
38 - When you browse the latest T-26 catalog while doing the Stairmaster at 24Hour Fitness. (I'm sure the person next to me wondered why I'd be looking at alphabets).
39 - You tell your wife (husband) what font is used in the title or credits at the movies. Like she (he) really cares.... :-)
40 - ...someone tells you to get a life ... and you think "I have three in PostScript and five in TrueType ...."
41 - And you are *really* addicted if your personalized license plate is "FONTS"!
42 - You save the comp.fonts and alt.binaries.fonts postings that begin with the phrase "the top ten signs that you are a fontaholic" in their own special subdirectory.
[Portions Copyright - Jeff Rankin-Lowe/SIRIUS 2000 All Rights Reserved.]