What the font !

 The last couple days, I've been working with fonts. So you can bet the next couple posts to the blog will be about , you guessed it , FONTS ! Not the most exciting topic but if you do a lot of design work , fonts may be of interest to you. If you don't do a lot of design work or change around fonts at all, then these next few posts will probably be pretty boring. In advance, sorry !

Doing some artwork for a customer the other day I thought it was a good time to upgrade and expand my font library. I just couldn't find the right font for the job. So I stopped everything, and started looking around for a font library I could purchase. Because this was a commercial job I wanted a font pack that was commercial use, and if possible royalty free so I could use it on multiple jobs.

I did a little research on font management using GNU/Linux, downloaded a new font manager, more on that in another post, and started searching for a new font pack. I went to Amazon and found this package 5000 fonts. It was just what I wanted and only $29.99. Perfect.

The package was available for digital download, and I was a little concerned about the format the package would be delivered in. Amazon didn't give any information about the file itself, ie; zip, rar, etc... So I figured I'd take a chance, worst case scenario, I download the package, if it's an executable .exe I'll open it on a friends computer, extract the fonts I want and then leave the file in my ftp server for safe keeping and further use down the road. 

Amazon unfortunately decided to use a Windows or Mac only downloader. WTF, I just want to download the file, by all that's holy and unholy why would you do such a thing ? Wwwhhhyy ? I couldn't even download the file. So I then called Amazon, told them of my plight, and the customer service rep instantly  refunded my money.

The strangest thing about this story is that according to the Amazon customer service rep I spoke with, the customer service department uses Ubuntu. The customer service rep said they can't even use half of Amazons services , and didn't understand why the company wouldn't make the website more Linux friendly.

Now, I can't watch movies on Amazon, and I can't participate in digital downloads. That really sux because I spend a lot of money on their site. Hopefully they make the sight more Linux friendly in the future. 

With that said, I'm on a mission today for commercial use font packs that are Linux friendly. I'll be posting my results, along with a little information on the new font manager I downloaded.  I guess the moral of this story is , if your looking to use the Amazon digital download service for software, and what not, you're not going to be doing it with a Linux machine !

On a final note, if anyone has any suggestions on where to download some decent commercial use fonts, please feel free to comment.