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What exclusive agreement? Adobe licensed Helvetica and shipped it with pretty much every DTP-related product they had on any platform. Helvetica is in every Postscript printer, for example. Those aren't Mac only.

Helvetica was never cheap to license which meant that Microsoft went hunting elsewhere pretty early on and licensed the cheap (in every sense of the word) knock-off "Arial". But that was a Microsoft decision, it wasn't made by Monotype or Apple.

You can buy it here.

I agree it isn't ubiquitous, most of the time a sans-serif font that looks like Helvetica is a knock off or a font inspired by it but redesigned for a specific purpose like the Rail Alphabet. But occasionally you get to see it in its glory, and it has to be said, it's one of the most beautiful fonts in the world.

What exclusive agreement? Adobe licensed Helvetica and shipped it with pretty much every DTP-related product they had on any platform. Helvetica is in every Postscript printer, for example. Those aren't Mac only.

Helvetica was never cheap to license which meant that Microsoft went hunting elsewhere pretty early on and licensed the cheap (in every sense of the word) knock-off "Arial". But that was a Microsoft decision, it wasn't made by Monotype or Apple.

You can buy it here.

I agree it isn't ubiquitous, most of the time a sans-serif font that looks like Helvetica is a knock off or a font inspired by it but redesigned for a specific purpose like the Rail Alphabet. But occasionally you get to see it in its glory, and it has to be said, it's one of the most beautiful fonts in the world.

Freaking slashcode. https://www.fonts.com/font/lin...

Though if they want to maximize readability, why aren't the using fonts with the little training wheels specially designed to make letters faster to read and easier to recognize in bad reading conditions, what's the name: SERIF fonts!

For road signs, they don't want to maximize readability, they want to maximize legibility, which is not the same thing. For example see: It's About Legibility:

While the argument continues to rage about whether sans serifs are easier to read than serif fonts in text copy, sans serif typefaces, because their letter shapes are simpler, have been proven to be slightly more legible than their serifed cousins.

I agree that serif fonts are generally more readable than sans-serif fonts. Having to read a book that is entirely sans-serif is a chore. The serifed fonts are usually easier to read because the serifs help guide your eye to scan an entire line of text. But for road signs, it is more important to recognize words than to scan lines. That's why they use sans-serif fonts which have been found to be more legible. For signs, you don't need serifs to guide your eye like when you are reading a page of text. In addition, the serifs act like noise and make it slightly more difficult to recognize single letters, especially when parts of the letters are obscured.

According to this blog post the font is ITC Benguiat.

Judging from The Fonts.com Web Fonts page, they're using some sort of javascript to try to protect their fonts. If I toggle javascript on and off for fonts.com, the look of that page changes as a bunch of fonts turn on/off. Their "three easy steps" on the right also includes "Add a short script to your site".

Oh yeah? What about Arial(R) black?

'nuff said :)

Indeed, indeed.

There's a reason that professionally designed, usability-centered type families cost hundreds of dollars -- they take many months of careful planning, experimentation (often through scientific trials), and adjustment to bring from concept to completion.

It is no more possible to quickly design a good typeface online than it is to quickly design a good CRM system and database backend using an easy online construction kit.

An interesting, informative article about Verdana:

http://www.fonts.com/AboutFonts/Verdana.htm

and a comment I made on some previous thread about Verdana:

http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=171165&c id=14256548

I find Verdana by far one of the easiest fonts to read on a screen. I've continued to maintain mis-trust of the world's (and especially the non-MS world's) continuing access to it. Yes, I have the "free font pack" saved off, somewhere, but I can't expect/guarantee other users of my stuff to 1) Have access to it themselves; 2) Be able to and/or willing to install it manually.

Thanks for showing your working, but it really DOESN'T need to mean every font size. As someone up there has already mentioned, it's entirely possible to have multiple cuts of a typeface family (each a different font) that you and I will read as "one" but a font audit will claim "fifty". For example...

http://www.fonts.com/findfonts/detail.htm?pid=4136 65

Other reasons why 11000 fonts can be found...
Freelancers taking around their own font stashes. It used to be a SyQuest disk, now you can carry an iPod with gigabytes of the things.
Jobs that pass through with fonts included
Someone made a copy of an unlocked Adobe/Monotype/Linotype etc. font library

On my own font audit, I found more than 2000 on one Macintosh. We have 250 Macs here... Needless to say we are now completely legal.

For spot audits?

That would be the license. Read the fine license sometime -- a lot of them allow the vendor to do an audit.

Lets take the Adobe License for Photoshop for example:

http://www.adobe.com/products/eulas/index.html

"Compliance with Licences. If you are a business, company or organization, you agree that upon request from Adobe or its authorized representative you will within thirty (30) days fully document and certify that use of any and all Adobe software at the time of the request is in conformity with your valid licences from Adobe."

Lets take Monotype next:

http://www.fonts.com/Legal/MI-EULA.htm

"If you are a business or organization, you agree that upon request from MI or MI's authorized representative, you will with thirty (30) days fully document and certify that use of any and all MI Font Software at the time of the request is in conformity with your valid licences from MI."

I am not bothering with Microsoft right now. You should have the idea already...

Ratboy

>How is it even possible to use 11,000 different type faces?? They have to be adding up all the fonts on all the PCs. 500 PCs with unlicensed Adobe Garamond = 500 fonts.

Bzzt, wrong. As TFA says, the audit was conducted by a representative of Monotype, which alone lists 2230 distinct fonts in its catalog. I'd think they would properly know how to account for usage. And there are a lot of foundries.

>How is it even possible to use 11,000 different type faces?? They have to be adding up all the fonts on all the PCs. 500 PCs with unlicensed Adobe Garamond = 500 fonts.

Bzzt, wrong. As TFA says, the audit was conducted by a representative of Monotype, which alone lists 2230 distinct fonts in its catalog. I'd think they would properly know how to account for usage. And there are a lot of foundries.

One thing that Microsoft -- or the people they hired -- got right.

Microsoft used to have some web pages for 'Internet/Web fonts'. These included both a collection of TrueType fonts (including Verdana) and some history and other stuff (e.g. a history of Verdana). The pages were up until a year or two ago.

Then, shortly after I commented to a business analyst (read: specifications author) on the suitability of Verdana, including both the high appeal of the font but also the potential risk of using MS intellectual property and the potential for sharing to cease, I found those MS web pages had been removed. I don't know whether they've since been restored or placed elsewhere.

Regarding the history and intent, translating into suitability, of Verdana, a quick google turns up:

http://www.fonts.com/AboutFonts/Verdana.htm

Microsoft tried to butt in on Adobe's turf before with Truetype, but no one (or at least, no one important) does Truetype font libraries, Bitstream, Monotye et al all make their fonts type 1 postscript.

From Monotype:

"since more and more folks are looking for TrueType fonts, every new typeface we release is available in both formats"

From Bitstream:

"Bitstream sells fonts for Windows in TrueType, OpenType, or PostScript Type 1 format"

Looks like TrueType is doing just fine. You might want to brush up on your recent history.

Microsoft didn't make most of those fonts, but rather just licensed them from Monotype and B&H. Comic Sans MS, Georgia, Tahoma, Trebuchet MS, Verdana and Wingdings are the only ones that MS created (presumably). Arial, Times New Roman, and the other very well known ones are Monotype fonts.

Microsoft didn't make most of those fonts, but rather just licensed them from Monotype and B&H. Comic Sans MS, Georgia, Tahoma, Trebuchet MS, Verdana and Wingdings are the only ones that MS created (presumably). Arial, Times New Roman, and the other very well known ones are Monotype fonts.

The others are: Bembo, Garamond Condensed

The others are: Bembo, Garamond Condensed

The others are: Bembo, Garamond Condensed

how appropriate. But wouldn't be Dingbats the right font for Mr. Bush instead?

Most of the "Buy it" links point to http://www.qksrv.net which takes you eventually to this page.

Didn't know you could determine that everyone who needed them already had them. Interesting. I'd like to see the metric used to determine that.

It's true that Andalé Mono is very good fixed-width font. I particularly like the way it makes it hard to confuse l with 1, 0 with O, etc. And yes, it scales very well. The first thing I do when configuring any app that uses fixed with fonts -- Xterm, console text editors, IDEs, web browsers -- is to replace the usual Courier or system font with Andalé Mono. Which is not all what MS intended, and mostly illegal. Imagine my dismay!

One quibble with this font is that multiple underbars form a continuous line, which makes source code slightly harder to read. I keep looking for a free font that lacks this problem. But that mostly means amateur efforts, which rarely scale well.

Microsoft may be less a culprit here than AGFA and the other companies that licensed these fonts to them. AGFA charges 22 bucks for each download of Andalé Mono, and no doubt they licensed the font with the understanding that it'd only be used for specific purposes. When it became clear that everybody and anybody was downloading these fonts for all kinds of purposes, MS either had to pony up more licensing fees, or withdraw the fonts. Hardly suprising they did the latter.