Many of us use different types of letters – fonts without thinking about how much effort graphic designers put into their preparation. In addition, many fonts contain special accessories that make them even more attractive. In the IT industry, two types of fonts used to dominate – Adobe Post Script and Microsoft True Type. However, today they have been almost completely replaced by the so-called Open Type fonts, which is confirmed by the example you see on the screen. Some of the fonts used, such as Calibri, Cambria, Constantia and Corbel, appeared in Word 2007, and the new version brought us several new fonts that support the Open Type standard.

If you want to take advantage of all the advantages it provides, simply select the desired part of the text and open the auxiliary menu by pressing the right mouse button. After that, you can choose the Font option and open a new frame. You can achieve the same result if you click on this little button from the Font section. If you then go to the Advanced tab, all four options will appear on the screen that allow you to apply Open Type features. These are Ligatures, Number Spacing, Number Forms and Stylistic set. The first indicates the ability to make two different characters look like one. This can be achieved in four ways and I will show you how they differ. If you select the Standard Only option, the letter f will be connected with the next character with its horizontal line. This can be seen nicely in this part of the text where, by choosing the first option, the letters f and i will become one unit. The second option – Standard and Contextual in this case will not have a big impact on the appearance of the letters because the selected font does not have the appropriate characteristics. The most interesting effects can be achieved by choosing the third option – Historical and Discretional, because it most closely resembles the press that was used at the time when the printing press came into mass use. However, this effect should not be overdone because it can easily achieve the opposite effect and make reading much more difficult. If you want all the mentioned effects to be used on the same segment, choose the last option – All. At the end, I will close this frame by selecting the OK button and return to the document.

You must have noticed that the changes I just made were not reflected in the appearance of the selected text. For this to happen, you need to change another well-hidden parameter. To that end, by choosing the File option, I will go to Backstage and click on the Options item. In the frame that follows, you should immediately select the Advanced option, so that a parameter appears at the very end indicating that the current complete display of the document is adapted to version 2007. This may be due to the fact that this document was created using a previous version of Word, although this parameter can appear for completely different reasons. In any case, I will choose the Word option from this list and thus allow the full use of Open Type fonts. I’ll take this opportunity to click on the Layout Options item to bring up a number of additional options on the screen. At the moment, I’m only interested in one of them, and that’s the one related to the exclusion of Open Type fonts. Namely, if it is active, you will not be able to use all their advantages. Since I have made all the necessary changes in this way, there is nothing left for me to do but to close this frame by selecting the OK button. Now you can clearly see that all the set parameters have been fully applied to the selected text segment.

To show you what the second parameter – Number Spacing is for, I’ll scroll down a bit and show this table. As you yourself can conclude, it is used to determine the distance between individual digits, and you can adjust it in two ways – Tabular and Proportional. In the first case, the same space will be reserved for each digit, which means that it does not matter whether there is a one or a four somewhere. In this way, it is possible that, for example, the comma that separates the thousands is always in the same place. In the proportional regime, this does not have to be the case because each digit occupies a different space. This makes it somewhat difficult to compare vertically, but the font used is also important in all of this. From all this, it can be concluded that the proportional mode is good for numbers that are in plain text, while Tabular is much better for tables. In this example, I deliberately used 5 different fonts. I wanted to point out that Calibri and Cambria have Tabular characteristics, while Constantia, Corbel and Gabriola are proportional.

Before moving on to the next topic – Number Forms, I will select the corresponding segment of the text and immediately open the frame used to adjust the parameters. As you can see, you have two options available – Lining and Old style. If you want the numbers to be in the same plane as the rest of the text, choose the first option. This can be seen nicely in this example, because the number one is in the same line with the capital letter C. On the other hand, if you pay attention to the third paragraph, you will see that the number three located at the beginning is placed well below the base line. This is a typical example of the Old style option, because in that case the position of the numbers depends on the font itself.

If you don’t like it and want all characters to be at the same level, simply select the Lining option and close this frame. That’s all the difference – Old style allows the application of different levels, while using the Lining option, everything is placed at the same height.

The last parameter I will show you in this lesson is called the Stylistic set. To begin with, I will select some text again and open this frame. If I then click on the arrow next to this option, a series of numbers from 1 to 20 will appear on the screen. This means that you can choose one of the additional sets that represent an integral part of a font. In this case, the font I chose – Gabriola, contains a total of 7 additional sets, each of which is more ornate. To show you what it’s all about, I’ll click on the number 6 so that the appropriate example will immediately appear on the screen. As soon as I click on the OK button, Word will apply this parameter to the selected part of the document, so it will not be difficult for you to see what I have achieved. In any case, this is not an option that you will use often, but in some situations it can really serve you well.

Before I end this lesson, I would just like to draw your attention to one more possibility. Namely, if you activate the Use Contextual Alternatives option, Word will automatically use the characteristics of individual fonts and adapt the spacing between letters to the content itself. In practice, this means that characters followed by a blank space will receive a little more space than those followed by another character. In this way, the appearance of fonts that look like handwriting can be slightly improved.