Embroidery Fonts Print Out

[Liz Adler Designs]

Hey guys I need to know how to print out some sort of a cataloge showing all of the most popular fonts that I use to show my customers who only want one item like a name or a monogram. I do not know how to do this with Design Shop! Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[signman]

Your font listing is in a PDF file on your computer...and you can open that in Adobe and just print it out. I took it to my local printshop and they did it in color so all the designs showed up that are in there as 'fonts'.
IF you don't have all the fonts in the list (all the ones you can BUY are also in it) then just pull those pages out. We put the pages in vinyl 'sleeve protectors' from Staples so it's less chance to tear them out of the binder they are in.
Works great!

[Liz Adler Designs]

I will have to try that. Did you print out all of yours? That seems like it would have been a lot.

Thank you so much! You guys are awesome!

[Juli in Kona]

I did the very thing you want to do. What I did was set the height to .5" and starting at the top of the list, typed out the name of the font in that font, and kept doing that until I had one page full in two columns. I did it with the Melco fonts and then all my TTFs. I made them different colors just to look pretty. When I got the page full, I printed it out. That is tricky! I think I used a very nice little program called SnagIt to capture and print. And I printed it out on cover stock and put the pages in sheet protectors. Do not include any fonts that you know are not good because your customer, for sure, will think it really nice and you'll be stuck with trying to make a bad font look nice.

You can use the DS File/Print Preview, but you will have to experiment to see how many you can get on one sheet. When you find the height of the total design that works to fit on one sheet, then draw a border around it and save that border in a separate file so you can use it over and over. I have pages and pages of fonts. After awhile you'll find that, in general, people are choosing the same ones over and over. So, after a year or so, you can make another list with only the ones people choose. The list will be surprisingly short! And I don't let my customers tell me to choose the font! I make them choose - but I will make suggestions.

And, BTW, did you know that you don't need to install all the fonts you want to use. You can just put the TTF files in some other directory/folder and when you want to use one of them, double click on it and it will come up in the font viewer. Minimize that window and go to DS and now that font will appear in the list. Very nice. Just a nice way to not clutter up your computer with tons of unnecessary fonts.

Juli in Kona

[signman]

The entire 'Melco' font list isn't that bad...there's probably only 50 fonts or something.
My graphic program (Mac Freehand) uses a lot of fonts. We printed out the entire font list years ago-that's around 2,000 fonts and fills a 3" ring binder with 9 fonts per page...currently my newer mac has 6,900 fonts I can access and I have another 5-6,000 on one disk I bought I haven't had time to load in yet.
There's lots of duplicates with different names but those we eventually weed out. I would guess that I run about 400 'open' and active fonts and any given day might use or open another 50 or so to find a font to match up to a logo.

[signman]

By printing the pdf file, 1 font per page shows the entire alphabet, and you also get the size minimums and maximum charts, also if additional underlayment is required for that font. Having the size chart shows the customer immediately that she/he cannot get that fancy script font sewn .2 inches high for example...saved us a ton of trouble many times. Customers always have that attitude that THEY know better than us as to how our machines or processes work!
Using the sheet protectors you can also sew out a sample of each font in a couple sizes, just the name of the font as a test-and throw that sample in the page.

[Liz Adler Designs]

yeah I have about over 5k as well to match logos etc. I am going to focus more on the popular ones for names and monogramming like curlz, script, etc. Something I can have out so my customers who are looking for that can have something to quickly access.

I have only had my AMAYA XT for less than a month. I am still trying to get all of my business staples together! I am still trying to figure out an order form that I like as well for the people who want one thing embroidered like a purse that they bring to me. Any suggestions would be awesome!

[signman]

you should be able to 'search' the archive posts here, maybe under 'hoop charge' or 'pricing' and see what comes up. Generally, most of the shops get $10 minimum for anything brought in for embroidery.
Or $5 'hoop charge' plus $1.50 per thousand stitches, hourly charge for designing or flat rate digitizing charge. There is a 'range' of pricing-this has been topic of conversation here many times, but the 'core' pricing is about the same.
Don't forget...you are NOT going to make money off 'stitch charge'...you can sew out 10,000 stitches on a jacket in less than 15 minutes...but it will tie you up for an HOUR just getting the design right, picking the colors, doing a test (another 10,000) and then hooping the jacket and sewing it. Do you work for $10 or $15 an hour? No...you need to BILL a minimum of $40-50 an hour for one machine if you want to pay your lease, insurance, electricity, buy supplies, and if you are lucky, have enough profit left to buy lunch.

[Liz Adler Designs]

okay I am having issues opening the font files in adobe. I am going to c://melco embroidery systems/ alphabets

When I try to open anything in there it says it needs to know what program created it. I try to open it with acrobat and it gives me an error message and says it will not support it and cannot open it.

Ugh this is frustrating!! I would like to open it the way you suggested signman so I can get all of the ranges etc. Any thoughts?

[Juli in Kona]

In DS when you bring up the lettering properties, there is an icon under the white box for typing in the text, over to the right named "Code Sheet". Just click on that and you have all the sheets.

Juli in Kona

[signman]

I'm not a PC person...go mac!...but all I did was bring the CD with the font listing to my friend the printer-he clicked and opened it, set to 1 per page and ran the whole list.
I've opened it as Juli said but couldn't remember where it was-but we don't have a printer connected to that computer anyways-that's why I sent it out for printing. If you have Acrobat on your computer, it should automatically 'click' open any PDF file. You might need to update Acrobat though...I know my PC has a version that is 4-5 years old. All my macs have the current version.

[Steve]

Liz Adler Designs
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