Adding Fonts
Comic Life comes with a very useful comic lettering font (DigitalStrip) that's great for many projects but you will soon be looking for more fonts to add variety to your effects, titles, balloons and captions.
The good news is that Mac OS X and the web make adding fonts very easy and cheap! There are literally hundreds of quality fonts available for free on the web and some are very useful for making comics. There are even a few web sites that are dedicated to comic fonts - though many of their fonts are not free.
Where to find fonts
Comic Font Sites
These sites have excellent free and commercial comic fonts available for download:
- Blambot - www.blambot.com
- Lots of lettering, titling and sound effect fonts and some free samples.
- www.comic.com
- Lots of lettering, titling and sound effect fonts and some free samples.
Those sites also have lots of useful tips on creating comics so take a look around while you're there.
General Font Sites
These sites have a wide variety of fonts available for download:
- www.fonts.com
- A huge site with lots of free fonts
Adding fonts
Once you've downloaded a font making it available to Comic Life is very simple.
- If the font is compressed (e.g.: .zip, .sit etc) uncompress it first.
- Open a new Finder window (in the Finder: File->New Finder Window)
- In the new window navigate to your HOME->Library->Fonts folder
You can of course add them to your computer Library->Fonts folder if you want the font to be available to every user of the computer.
- Drag your new font to the Fonts folder
- Open the Font Panel - your new font should be listed in the "All Fonts" category.
The Font Book application (part of Mac OS X since 10.3) makes it easy to organize your fonts - try creating font collections for balloon, sound effect and title fonts so that they're easy to find when you're creating a comic.