How Do I Access Special Font Characters
**** This image below is cropped from DesignBundles.net I am not affiliated with them however it is one of the ONLY sites I use for my designs and fonts. They come WITH a commercial license (which I think is super important) and when you have a membership you get access to so many free things! *****
*****At the time I wrote this I was not affiliated with DesignBundles.net. I am now affiliated with them. All this means to you is that when you click on links on my blogs for their site, I get a small payment from them. It does NOT affect the price for you in any way.******
Accessing Those Amazing Special Characters
When I first got my Cricut and started crafting with it, I always saw people using these awesome fonts with all these swishes and extra graphics. You know the ones right!?!?
I wanted those in my creations! However, I couldn't figure it out. People would say use the character map on your computer and I could never figure that out. Then one day I saw a comment about a program called 'Main Type'! I had that same OMG moment I had when I discovered Wordmark.it, but that is a blog for another day. So YouTube to the rescue! lol Yep my favorite teacher, well that and mistakes. I would like to break it down super simple for you so that you don't need to struggle :) I will try to get a video out shortly (when I am recovered from my hip surgery and in my new craft room/office/supply room).
I find the best way to get your font collection going is to purchase a bundle that has a large variety of fonts. This bundle from Design Bundles has some great fonts in it and is an AMAZING price!
Or to get access to free fonts all the time sign up for the Plus program through Design Bundles.
STEP ONE
You will need to go to google and search for a program called Main Type. You may want to include font characters in the search to help narrow it down a bit.
STEP TWO
You will then need to download it according to your device. I have a PC so I downloaded that version. This is what it will look like when you open it. Click on the Use Free Edition, unless you would like to buy it.
STEP THREE
You know want to open Design Space OR Silhouette Studio OR Inkscape, whichever program you will be using. For this example I will be using Design Space. You will want to add the text you want to add to your design.
STEP FOUR
I find that when I find a font I like in Wordmark.it I will then go and check Main Type for that font and see if has anything I like within the special characters. (Also side note - Did you know that there are fonts you can get that are just simply characters?!?!?! How freaking awesome is that!) Sorry back to what y'all are here for lol
So I liked the font 'Acapella Script' I had downloaded onto my computer and then went and checked Main Type to see if there were any special fonts I liked and there were! I wanted a little swish on the 'l' so this worked perfect!
STEP FIVE
You can skip step five first and go straight to step 6 first but for ease of explaining and showing you how the process works I am adding this step first. Go back to DS and double click on the text you would like to add the special character to. So for this example I double clicked on the word 'love'. This brought up the ability to edit this text. You then need to highlight the letter you want to alter. For this example, this letter would be the 'l'.
STEP SIX
You will now need to go back to Main Type and on the right side panel where all the special characters are find the letter you would like to use. Right click on the letter or character you would like and copy to clipboard.
STEP SEVEN
Go back to DS paste the special character/letter into the letter you want to replace. Sometimes DS likes to be finicky - I know BIG surprise! - so you will want to possibly use the paste key combination to paste the character/letter you would like. For PCs this is ctrl + v. This will replace the regular 'l' with an l with a heart attached.
I hope this helps with your amazing creations! Happy Crafting y'all!
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