: How to evaluate the quality of a font before deciding whether to purchase it for commercial purposes? How can a newbie to graphic design like myself evaluate a the technical design of a font

@Heady304

Identify what characters you need. Mathematical symbols? Ancient greek? A really neat ampersand (&) character? Other miscellaneous symbols?
Identify the font style you'd like to use - sans-serif (like Helvetica) or serif (like Times New Roman).
Identify whether you need italics, bold, heavy, light, condensed, or extended weights or alternative character styles (small caps, etc.) for the font. Basically identify how much you need the font to do.
Identify the feeling or concept you want the font to help convey - quirky, funny, scientific, serious, meaningful, utilitarian, etc.
Now that you have your list of needs and wants, start looking.
As others noted, many font vendors provide a means for you to test out the font online to see what it can do. Test them against your list above and find out which ones get you all the way there or perhaps most of the way there. If it doesn't get you all of the way there, consider looking for a second font family that pairs well with the first choice to fill in those gaps and provide a counter-point to your first font.
I highly recommend reading Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works - this will give you a basic primer on type, the vocabulary used around type and typography, and how to use type.

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@Ogunnowo857

There are several ways to go about doing this. In any case you should definitely purchase the font before using it in a final product. Creating quality fonts can take a lot of time.

The first way is to find the font online for sale and use the foundry's font previewer to test out the words you want to use and see how they will look.

The second way is to use the foundry's website to create a preview for the font and then download the preview as an image from your browser to use as a comp in your design. (You can also vectorize the downloaded image using Illustrator or Vector Magic)

The third way, which is questionable from a license standpoint, is to find the commercial font online for free download. Once you have tried the font, make sure to purchase it legally before using in any final product.

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