A font is a set of characters—letters, numbers, and symbols—that share a common weight, width, and style, such as 10‑pt Adobe Garamond Bold.
Typefaces (often called type families or font families) are collections of fonts that share an overall appearance, and are designed to be used together, such as Adobe Garamond.
A type style is a variant version of an individual font in a font family. Typically, the Roman or Plain (the actual name varies from family to family) member of a font family is the base font, which may include type styles such as regular, bold, semibold, italic, and bold italic.
For CJK-language fonts, the font style name is often determined by the variation in thickness (also called weight). For example, the Japanese font Kozuka-Mincho Std includes six weights: Extra Light, Light, Regular, Medium, Bold, and Heavy. The font style name which is displayed depends on the font manufacturer. Each font style is a stand-alone file. If the font style file has not been installed, that font style cannot be selected from Font Style.
In addition to the fonts installed on your system, you can also create the following folders and use fonts installed in them:
If you install a Type 1, TrueType, OpenType, or CID font into your local Fonts folder, the font appears in Adobe applications only.
You can view samples of a font in the font family and font style menus in the Character panel and other areas in the application from where you can choose fonts. The following icons are used to indicate different kinds of fonts:
To view the list of fonts available for Illustrator, do one of the following:
- Browse to Character panel (Ctrl + T) > Font Family drop-down
- Browse to Control panel > Font Family drop-down
OpenType fonts use a single font file for both Windows® and Macintosh® computers, so you can move files from one platform to another without worrying about font substitution and other problems that cause text to reflow. They may include a number of features, such as swashes and discretionary ligatures, that aren’t available in current PostScript and TrueType fonts.
Note:
OpenType fonts display the 
icon.
When working with an OpenType font, you can automatically substitute alternate glyphs, such as ligatures, small capitals, fractions, and old style proportional figures, in your text.
A. Ordinals B. Discretionary ligatures C. Swashes
OpenType fonts may include an expanded character set and layout features to provide richer linguistic support and advanced typographic control. OpenType fonts from Adobe that include support for central European (CE) languages include the word “Pro,” as part of the font name in application font menus. OpenType fonts that don’t contain central European language support are labeled “Standard,” and have an “Std” suffix. All OpenType fonts can also be installed and used alongside PostScript Type 1 and TrueType fonts.
For more information on OpenType fonts, see www.adobe.com/go/opentype.
Illustrator supports OpenType SVG fonts, such as colored fonts and emoji fonts. OpenType SVG fonts provide multiple colors and gradients in a single glyph.
Using Emoji fonts, you can include various colorful and graphical characters, such as smileys, flags, street signs, animals, people, food, and landmarks in your documents. OpenType SVG emoji fonts, such as the EmojiOne font, let you create certain composite glyphs from one or more other glyphs. For example, you can create the flags of countries or change the skin color of certain glyphs depicting people and body parts such as hands and nose.
For the purpose of illustration, let's consider EmojiOne, an OpenType SVG emoji font. You can composite several EmojiOne OpenType SVG font characters to create glyphs.
For example, you can create the flags of countries or change the skin color of single-person or body part default characters usually colored 
, 
, or 
.
Note:
Glyphs in an emoji font, such as the EmojiOne, are distinct from the letters on your keyboard. These glyphs are treated as distinct characters and are available only through the Glyphs Panel rather than the keyboard.
Create flags of countries
The "letters” (A, B, C, D, and so on) in EmojiOne do not correspond to the corresponding keys on the keyboard. When you combine these characters in the Glyphs Panel to make up a country’s ISO code, the two characters form the flag of that country. For example, US gives the American flag, GB gives the British flag, AR gives the Argentine flag, and IN gives the Indian flag.
Create character variants
Combine single-person default characters; usually
Notes:
- The single-person characters or body parts emojis can be matched with any of the skin colored characters only once.
- Composite glyphs are a font feature. Not all OpenType SVG fonts let you combine characters to create composite glyphs.
- You can decompose some EmojiOne composites into their constituent characters.
Illustrator now supports Variable Font, a new OpenType font format supporting custom attributes like weight, width, slant, optical size, etc. This release of Illustrator ships with several variable fonts for which you can adjust weight, width, and slant using convenient slider controls available when you 
Search for 
Choose Type > Recent Fonts to view the custom fonts that you've created and recently used in your document.
You can select a text in your document or choose a sample text to preview the fonts in real time. Multiple sample text options are available that you can choose for the preview.
To see the preview of a selected text or sample text, hover the pointer over a font name in the font list available in the Control panel or Character panel.
To preview the font characteristics, such as size, style, leading, and tracking in real time, hover the pointer over the font characteristics available in the Control panel and the Character panel.
Note: Live preview for kerning is not available.
To turn off the preview options, do the following:
- Choose Edit > Preferences.
- In the Type Preferences, deselect the Enable in-menu font previews option.
The sample text and options are not displayed in the Fonts panel.
To change the font size of the selected or the sample text and view the preview in real time, click the Sample Size small, Sample Size medium, and Sample Size large icons.
To quickly find fonts that you use frequently, you can perform the following actions in the Fonts tab of the Character panel or the Properties panel:
- In the Classification Filter
drop-down list, select your preferred font classes to narrow down the font list. By default, all font classes are displayed.
Note: Only Roman fonts can be filtered using this filter. - Set the frequently used fonts as favorites. To do this, click the Favorite icon
displayed next to the font name when you hover over it. To filter all the favorite fonts in the font list, click the Show only Favorites filter.
- Select fonts that are recently installed on your local system. The recently used fonts are displayed on top in the font list.
Note: Recently used and starred fonts are preserved across Illustrator sessions.
- To search for fonts based on the visual similarity, click the View Similar icon (
) that appears when you hover over a font. Fonts closest in visual appearance to the selected font appear on top in the search results.
- To filter all the fonts that you have added in the last 30 days, click the Show Recently Added Filter icon
.
You can browse thousands of fonts from hundreds of type foundries from within Illustrator, activate them instantly, and use them in your artwork. Activated fonts are available for use in all Creative Cloud applications.
For more information about Adobe Fonts, visit fonts.adobe.com.
Note:
To view a list of all fonts that are recently added on fonts.adobe.com, click the Recently Added filter.
In the Find More tab, you can also browse and preview all Japanese fonts that are available on fonts.adobe.com. To set the preference to enable the preview of Japanese fonts, do the following:
- Choose Edit > Preferences > Type.
- Select Enable Japanese Font Preview in 'Find More'.
The changes are applied only when you relaunch Illustrator.
-
In the Control panel, set the Font and Font Style options.
In the Type menu, select a name from the Font or Recent Fonts submenu. Using the Font menu is convenient because it displays a preview of the available fonts.
In the Character panel, set the Font Family and Font Style options. In addition to choosing a name from the pop‑up menus, you can click the current name and type in the first few characters of the name you want.
Tip: To change the number of fonts in the Recent Fonts submenu, choose Edit > Preferences > Type (Windows) or Illustrator > Preferences > Type (macOS), and set the Number Of Recent Fonts option.
By default, typeface size is measured in points (a point equals 1/72 of an inch). You can specify any typeface size from 0.1 to 1296 points, in 0.001‑point increments.
Note:
In Fireworks, the typeface size is measured in pixels by default.
If a document uses fonts not installed on your system, an alert message appears when you open it. Illustrator indicates which fonts are missing and substitutes missing fonts with available matching fonts.
- To substitute missing fonts with a different font, select the text that uses the missing font and apply any other available font.
- To make missing fonts available in Illustrator, either install the missing fonts on your system or activate the missing fonts from the Adobe Fonts service. For more information, see Add fonts.
- To highlight substituted fonts in pink, choose File >Type, and select Highlight Substituted Fonts (and Highlighted Substituted Glyphs, if desired), and then click OK.
The default font in Adobe Illustrator is Myriad Pro. The default font is selected in the Font menu, Character palette, and as the Normal Character Style in the Character Styles panel. The default font is selected even if the document you open doesn't contain that font or if you last used another font before quitting Illustrator. You can change the default font in Illustrator by editing the default template files.
-
Navigate to the following location:
(Windows)OSDisk\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Illustrator [version number]Settings\en_US\x64\New Document Profiles
(macOS)Macintosh HD > User > [username] > Library > Application Support > Adobe > Adobe Illustrator [version number] > [Language folder] > New Document Profiles
Notes:
- Replace [username] with your account name.
- Replace [version number] with the following values, depending on the version of Illustrator that you have installed on your system. For more information, see Replace Illustrator version number.
- You cannot directly edit the document profile file on the above mentioned location. Copy the file to a different location and then edit the file.
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