Opening Samantha Font and Glyphs in Silhouette Studio (Tutorial)

If you follow Silhouette School on Facebook you know last week I was pretty much freaking out because the beautiful Laura Worthington Samantha font was on sale on Mighty Deals.  I snagged the upright version for $17...the font family usually costs upwards of $300! Truly, a mighty deal...(which has been extended so grab it while you can!!).  But then what? Ahhhh...I couldn't access the glyphs in Silhouette Studio. I had a few generous readers come to my rescue to help me figure out how to use the full font and now I'm here to pass along what I've learned.
First off - I would be remiss if I did not mention Kay Hall. Kay runs Clever Someday blog.  She has some wonderful video tutorials for more-advanced Silhouette users.  Among her tutorials is a set of video explaining how to fully access Samantha font in Silhouette Studio on both Windows and MAC. If you know anything about the Samantha font you probably know that each letter has a lot of aliases....there are dozens of variations of A, for example.  However, when you download and install the font (you want the desktop version) and open in Silhouette Studio only the standard 52 letters are accessed - capital A and lower case A, for example. But you certainly don't want to miss out on all the beautiful Samantha font extras so you need to access everything.

I have a MAC so I'm going to show you how I rather easily accessed all the letters in Studio on my MAC.  Keep in mind this only works if you're running OS (operating system) 10.9 or greater.  For Windows users I'm going to recommend you watch Kay's video.  Her tutorials are the easiest to understand and the most straight forward I've found when it comes to using Samantha and Silhouette together.

The first thing you want to do is download and install the Samantha font in your font book.  Click Download > Access the Zip File > Unzip > Click the TTF file for your Samantha font. (Mine says Upright PRO because that's the version of the font I purchased. Yours may say bold or italics if you
purchase those versions.)

Font Book will open > click Install Font.  The font will install on your computer.

Open up Silhouette Studio. If you had Studio opened while you were downloading and installing the font, you'll need to close out of Studio and reopen to get Samantha in your Studio font list.

Open up Font Book at the same time.  Click User to see all the fonts you have downloaded and installed onto your computer.  Navigate to Samantha. This is what you'll see right now and you'll probably notice it's missing all the fancy glyphs which is the whole reason you purchased Samantha.

If you go up to the menu bar and click PREVIEW and switch from Sample to Repertoire your view will change and you'll have access to the complete font!  Here are just a few of the 'A's'.

Now to open the font in Studio the easiest way to do this is to copy and paste.  Use the two scroll bars on the right side of the Font Book window to find the letter you'd like to use. Once you find it, click it to make it blue. Then simply hit COMMAND+C (copy).

Switch to your Silhouette Studio window and using the text tool (A in red on the top tool bar) hit COMMAND+V (paste).  It will come into Studio looking like this red box.  Don't worry!

Just click on the Text Style Window icon and form the Font Style scroll down to Samantha.

Now what I like to do from here is click back in the text box. By double clicking you get the cursor and can keep right on typing. Since your font is still on Samantha the standard Samantha font is used.

Then I pick just a few letters to stylize - in this case the t and n- because let's face it you don't want to over-edit your text, do you? So go back into your Font Book, find another letter (t), copy it, delete the current character (t) in the text box and replace it by pasting (t) in the stylized version of the same letter.  Repeat with 'n', etc.

When you're finished editing your font, you'll want to weld it all together so the letters cut as a solid word and not individual letters.   Highlight > right click > weld.  I've filled it in so you can see just how beautiful Samantha font is.

And that's how easy it is to use the Samantha font in Silhouette Studio on a MAC.

If you'd prefer to watch than read check this out...

Grab the Samantha Font on Might Deals!

What are your favorite fonts to use in Silhouette Studio? Leave a comment below.

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