Changing Fonts

When you open the Text tool, the default font is loaded and ready to use. When you choose a different font, it becomes the current font and all text you type appears in the current font. If you edit text that has a different font, the current font is replaced by the font of the text at the cursor position. For example, if you are working with Carta font and you edit text that uses Helvetica, Helvetica becomes the current font and all subsequent text you type appears in Helvetica.

You specify the default font in the Timeline FX > BFX tab of the Preferences menu. Also, you can install additional fonts for use in the Text Tool.

To change the current font:

  1. In the Font section of the Text menu, click the Font field.

    The font library appears.

    (a) Font Type box  (b) Font Preview window  

  2. In the Font Type box, select the font type you want to load.
    Type Description
    Type 1 A single-byte font type designed for Roman language fonts. Soft-links to the Adobe® Postscript® Type 1 fonts installed with the system or supplied by Autodesk are contained in /usr/discreet/font directory.
    CID A multi-byte adaptation of Adobe Postscript Type 1 fonts, well-suited to representing the large character sets of Asian languages such as Japanese, Korean and Chinese.
    TrueType A widely used cross-platform font format.
    OpenType® A font developed by Adobe and Microsoft® that supports expanded character sets and layouts.
    Auto Displays all font types, detecting the type automatically.
  3. In the file browser, navigate to the directory that contains the font you want to load.
  4. Preview a font. Do one of the following:
    • Select a font to see it with sample text in the Font Preview window.

      The sample text can be the text you selected in the text layer, or text that you enter by clicking the Font Preview window to display the on-screen keyboard.

    • In the Proxies/Titles box, select Proxies to preview fonts. If no proxy appears, click Generate Proxies to generate a font proxy.

      This process may take a while, but once you create the proxies, the settings are retained. Each time you return to the font library, you can toggle between viewing font titles and font proxies by selecting Proxies or Titles.

  5. Select the font.
  6. Click Load.

    The Text menu reappears with the name of the new font in the Font field.

Accessing OTF Fonts

In order to access symbols of the OTF font type, access the on-screen keyboard, enable the Symbols button (in the lower right of the keyboard), then use the arrow keys to browse through the pages of symbols until you find the character set you need.