Fonts with Blitz Max

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I've seen some cool examples of Fonts (not graphical fonts loaded in) used in Blitz Max games.

Questions

1) I've seen examples of Alpha blending fonts that look really cool. How are they done?
2) How do you prevent problems of the font not being available on target computers? Is it just a case of including the font file? Or is this bad practise?
3) What is the right way to handle fonts?
4) Can you make fonts have a soft edge (anti-alias) and not look blocky like on the old Blitz Basic 2D version?

Any tutorials, code samples, etc of using Fonts would be great.

Thanks.