TODAY'S TOURBUS TOPIC: FONTS AND FILTERS

In today's TOURBUS you'll learn how to jazz up your documents and web pages with fonts that get noticed. I've also got an update on spam filtering, so read on!

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THE SCRIPTORIUM

Looking for cool fonts with a Celtic, Gothic, Renaissance, Wild West, Fantasy, or Psychedelic theme? Make The Scriptorium your first stop. David Nalle is founder of The Scriptorium and a designer of original fonts adapted from historical source material. Dave got an early start in calligraphy, studying old manuscripts as a child and duplicating the lettering he liked.

You can download demo versions (Windows OR Mac) for most of the fonts at Fontcraft. The demos are free, but usually don't include numbers or punctuation. If you like a font you can purchase the full version at a very reasonable price. David Nalle says (and I quite agree) that "if you want a good, original design in a font with all the features you need, sometimes it's worth paying a little bit of money."

The Tips & Tricks area at the Scriptorium website has some other interesting links, such as tips for webmasters on font usage, an article on how fonts are designed, information about colorizing 19th century lithographs. You can also join the Scriptorium mailing list.

http://www.fontcraft.com

LARABIE FONTS

Ray Larabie started distributing free original fonts in the fall of 1996. His site became so popular that his ISP billed him for $1000
due to all the traffic. You can download dozens of unique and artistic fonts, and they're all free for personal AND commercial use. Both Windows and Mac versions are available.

Ray is Art Director at Rockstar Games Canada, and lives in Mississauga, Ontario. He stopped making freeware fonts in the summer of 2001 to devote more time to his commercial work, but the Larabie Fonts site will be kept online until the year 3001.

http://www.larabiefonts.com

JE NE PARLES PAS

No problem! If you're looking for non-English fonts, check out Fonts in Cyberspace, which offers more than 408 sources for 126 languages.

http://www.sil.org/computing/fonts

DISAPPEARING EMAIL?

If you're using Outlook 2000's Junk Email filter, or sending email to people who do, beware. Outlook's built-in junk and adult content filter is at once simple-minded and rather draconian.

According to the Microsoft Junk E-Mail Filter Readme, your email may vanish into a black hole if the message body contains any of the following phrases:

"m-o-n-e-y b-a-c-k" "c-a-r-d-s a-c-c-e-p-t-e-d" "r-e-m-o-v-a-l i-n-s-t-r-u-c-t-i-o-n-s" "e-x-t-r-a i-n-c-o-m-e" "g-u-a-r-a-n-t-e-e" AND "s-a-t-i-s-f-a-c-t-i-o-n" "m-o-r-e i-n-f-o" AND "v-i-s-i-t" "m-l-m"

I added the dashes so people using the Outlook filter would get this message. As you can see, a lot of perfectly legitimate emails would get caught in that trap. The filter also trashes any email where the From address contains "sales@" -- a very common practice for online businesses. This is just a sampling of the filters. You can find the complete list here:

http://office.microsoft.com/Assistance/9798/newfilters.aspx

OTHER SPAM FILTERING IDEAS

Because of the many security problems that have plagued all versions of Outlook, I STRONGLY RECOMMEND the use of a non-Microsoft email program. Here are some good ones that have robust filtering options:

Eudora (Win/Mac) - http://www.eudora.com

Pegasus (Win/Mac) - http://www.pmail.com

The Bat! (Win) - http://www.ritlabs.com/the_bat

For other tips on dealing with spam, see the Email911 site.

http://www.email911.com

That's all for now, see you next time! -- Bob Rankin