Font examples on the Web are in color. Why are my fonts not in color?

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Question: Font examples on the Web are in color. Why are my fonts not in color?

Font download sites often display a sample of a font. Many times these samples are enhanced with colors and special effects. What you are seeing is not the actual font but a graphic image with colors added.

Answer: Fonts have no color. They have positive and negative space, usually seen as black and white. Software can cause text to display on screen or print out in certain colors, but the fonts themselves don't come in colors. When you see multi-colored fonts displayed on the Web, such as the image in the sidebar to the right, that's a graphic image created in a software program.

Many word processing programs, Web software, and other software programs allow you to specify a solid display or printing color for your fonts. It doesn't change the actual font but it will show up on screen and print out in the color specified. You can't add color to the actual digital font file. For more complex colorings, such as the USA in the example, you'll need to use graphics software to create an image with characters from the font and then color it.

_{The stars and stripes in the American Dream font were painstakingly colorized in Corel Photo-Paint. The free font available from Ouvrez Police is in black and white, like all digital fonts.}