I was thinking about my observations on fonts (actually a seeming lack of) in an earlier post. I was grousing about how many of the other themes don’t show many fonts at all in the font selector drop down menu. Some show fewer than a dozen. Even with two Gutenberg plugins (they seem to get along fine), the font list was only the previously mentioned dozen or fewer. The Gutenberg plugins include dozens of fonts plus access to Google’s more than 1500 fonts. However something about the themes I tried and eliminated only allowed the few. A couple of themes promised if the user “upgraded”, they would have the 1500 plus fonts.
Since I had mostly settled on HybridMag, I was not going to plunk down for more money. Even before I did upgrade the HybridMag theme, the extra fonts were available. I was using the same TinyMCE editor plugin with all themes, so that was not the reason the font selection varied.
So many fonts I tried look so similar that I cannot tell the difference between them. Actually, they’re so close that trying a row of letters with a different “similar” font, no difference in appearance is seen without really close inspection. A dozen or so seemed to be just like the old classic Times New Roman font! Others seemed to be Tahoma clones, etc… Many were so strange that they were impossible to read without a lot of staring and mental processing.
I use the TinyMCE editor, which has been around for quite a while. It feels more like home as I have used it since it was the latest and greatest from waaaaay back when. It has all the most used menus that you would expect of a lightweight text editor. Actually it has more menu options than the early days of Microsoft Works! It reminds me of the earliest versions of Microsoft Word. If I open the font drop down while using HybridMag, I seem to be able to scroll forever. The assortment of fonts is staggering, but remember what you read in the paragraph above. After spending quite a bit of time playing around with unpublished tests, the default ‘Figtree’ font is truly my favorite!
None of the other themes supported any fonts even close to Figtree, however. At least none looked close. The fonts in the drop down either defaulted to Times New Roman or were too strange to even consider. Times New Roman had its place way back when dot matrix printers first came out. Everyone was familiar to either that or an extremely similar font on typewriters and daisy wheel printers. If your printer text output looked like your typewriter or daisy wheel printer, you simply felt better! At least that’s the way I felt and gathered from reading reviews and in conversations concerning dot matrix printers. Of course it couldn’t last….everyone got tired of the old fashioned Times New Roman and wanted to become unique. My mainstays had been Arial and Tahoma fonts.
You may ask why I chose HybridMag and why I shelled out for the “Pro” version. It simply offered more of what I like and wanted. A lot of the flashy effects of the other themes seemed to cause instabilities and strange behavior. Some effects were nice, I admit, but in the end, really offered nothing of value. HybridMag’s Pro version gave a lot more customization that seemed useful in addition to what I considered already usefully ample customizing choices.
The fire truck picture is there just because it was at the top of the gallery I uploaded. I saw this beauty around 2007 or so on Christmas Eve at a hotel I was staying while on a service call in another part of Virginia, where I was living at the time. It was a demonstrator model for two body styles. Each end was fully outfitted with what would be used for driving, but only one end actually worked. One end had headlights, while the other had taillights in addition….obviously that was the back end! You can see that the wheels to the left are for the front as they are turned slightly. I bet the representatives driving this had to get used to a lot of strange looks!
