Here is a story I wrote a while ago that never got published. I guess it was just a bit bitter at the time! I still love the graphic!

Fonts. Font management. Installing Fonts. De- Installing Fonts. Fonts and Windows Performance. Using Font Management Utilities to Monitor Fonts and Windows Performance. True-Type Fonts. Adobe Type One Fonts. PostScript Fonts. Font Cartridges. Downloading Active, Non- Printer-Resident Fonts. PANOSE Font-Substitution Algorithm Parameters. Installing WFN Fonts In Your Symbols Directory. CORELFNT.INI And Your Fonts. Font Disks, Font Packs, Font Families. Serif Fonts And San-Serif Fonts, Plain Fonts, Fancy Fonts, Silly Fonts, And Boring Fonts! FONTS! FONTS! FONTS! AAAGH!!! Sorry. It is just that I was tossed violently over the edge by fonts recently, and I haven't quite fully recovered. It's not pretty, this tale of torture and carnage, but I will tell you anyway. Being a Corel user you are used to such things! It all started, as these things always do, with another CorelDRAW! upgrade. Sure! Why not? What the hey? Heck, I just got Corel 4 down, and my Doctor recommended more "learning-curve" in my diet! So I plunked down that annual "beta-test-site" registration fee, and soon another shiny CD was in my possession! Slapped that bad dog in the caddy, pressed the magic buttons, and was off on another fine adventure! Then the dam burst... Let me back track a bit. I would love to accuse Corel 5 for my recent mental breakdown, but it is not entirely to blame. Oh sure, I would love to blame Corel 5 for many things, including global warming, my expanding waist-line and saggy diapers that leak, but, alas, I can not. I can't because I know (as does my Magic 8 ball) that other things are to blame for my condition. Mostly my madness is brought about by mystic, unseen forces in the universe, harnessing the powers of un-sold "Spam" luncheon meat and discarded AA batteries! Or perhaps I am being punished by the gods for the less-than-patient way I will behave in the future towards small children and animals. Or because I hate bean sprouts. Valid theories. Or I could listen to my friends and their theory, which, greatly simplified, is that I "suck". In laymen's terms, they suggest that I incessantly hack on my computer system, and therefore bring misery on to myself. This may be true, but there is actually only one bonafide reason for my "sanity-challenged" condition. This, of course, is "Fonts"! You see, I, being a self-proclaimed computer professional and full-time compu-geek, am constantly fine- tuning my system. In the hopes of gleaning just a bit more speed out of my beast, I am perpetually installing and de- installing everything. This isn't easy, as my poor computer is cluttered to the hilt with the excesses of my fancy. I have quite the eclectic collection of files, from 3-D modeling software to a fine sampling of totally ridiculous sound clips! So one day I decided to trash everything, start over, and in return have a lean, mean, computing machine! This of course led to hours of face-rubbing, disk-swapping, obscenity-shouting, and finally, a total and complete disdain for @$%#^%! FONTS! Fonts, yes. The end of my sanity and potentially the world as we know it, because of Fonts! Why fonts? Well, because I had already spent many an hour gleaning my font collection for my favorites, discarding the rest. In my impassioned desire for computing purity, I forgot to consider this, and trashed everything. So I had to start all over. Start over?! Do you know what this means?! Because of fonts, this process is ludicrous! Since CorelDRAW! 3 there have been literally hundreds of Fonts to choose from, from Corel and third-party vendors! Why pick and choose? Why? Why?! Because Windows runs like an inebriated slug if you don't! So I went through that god-awful process of installing all the fonts, then one-by-one deciding their fate, keeping the "best" and tossing the rest. Not speedy. But I did it. Fine. Fineeto. Whoops! I blasted them all! AAAAAAGH! So I did it again. Then CorelDRAW! 4 came along and not only gave us more fonts, but gave us the same fonts twice!! AAAGH! So I installed everything again!!! Now CorelDRAW! 5 is here and my font worries are over, right? HA! HA! HA! More fonts! More install options! And now PANOSE FONT SUBSTITUTION and MacIntosh names?! Who's idea was it to include Mac names? Why bother to cater to the MacInSnobs now?! We Corel users have had to hurdle all the obstacles they have set up at every service-bureau in the world! "Duh, we only know how to output Mac files...." Screw-em! Don't take up my disk space!! They should have hopped aboard that masochistic Corel bandwagon long ago, dammit! Anyway, back to fonts and now this "PANOSE" thing. PAN-NOSE? Sounds like some sort of violent facial cookware collision! So PANOSE is here and to the rescue? Oh gee, thanks! Like I installed enough fonts for the substitution algorithms to even work! I wouldn't even need PANOSE if the dang font names weren't randomly scrambled somewhere along the line! Screw it, I'm keeping my Corel 3 fonts with their funky-phonetic names! Fonts. Makes my face twitch just saying it. Fonts. See? There it goes again! Sad. O.K., so there is a light at the end of the tunnel (and it's not an on-coming train?!). I have been told that there are some great Font-management tools available to the hapless Font-o-phobic such as myself who is nearing a font-induced fancy-font aneurysm! These packages, such as Font-Minder (included on your 5.0 CD to the non-curious who failed to wander out on to the uncharted lands of your CD-ROM directory) and Font-Handler ("free" in the Corel-coupon book!) are a nice Band-Aid cure for the font abraised. The programs let you assign font-packs and install and de-install these font-collections on the fly. Handy, if you are so inclined to be that gosh-darn organized and actually remember which fonts go with each job! Eventually I can see myself using these utilities, but right now I can't get excited about more steps in my work day! Oh, the new Mosaic tells me which fonts are used in a file? Well, at least I'll know in advance if things are going to go clablooie! Some comfort! Fonts; The Devil's alphabet! And then a friend gives me a CD-ROM with over 2,700 fonts on it! That means that lurking in every dark, scary corner of my office are somewhere in the neighborhood of four-thousand fonts! My god. Toto, this ain't Kansas anymore! IT IS INSANE! STOP THE MADNESS!! So I ditched Corel 5, re-installed 4 and picked out about 200 fonts. I add the occasional straggler to my font list as I discover them, and make sure anything exotic is converted to curves before it leaves my system. Things are just about back to normal and the Doctor says that the involuntary shouting is just temporary. I should be fine, unless my system tells me one more time that "Common Bullets" can't be found! AAAGH!!!!