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Mac Users' Internet Experience to Retain Same Fonts
thefickler sent in this article that opens, "Mac users will continue to see the Internet as it was intended, thanks to the renewal of a font licensing agreement between Microsoft and Apple. At TypeCon2007 Microsoft and Apple announced they have renewed their font licensing agreement, giving Apple users ongoing use of the latest versions of Microsoft Windows core fonts. Back in 1996 Microsoft started the "Core fonts for the Web" initiative. The idea of this initiative was to create a a standard pack of fonts that would be present on all or most computers, allowing web pages to be displayed consistently on different computers. While the project was terminated in 2002, some of the fonts defined as core fonts for the web have gone on to become known as "web safe fonts," and are therefore widely used by Internet developers."
Let's see what Apple gained here:
1. Arial - Crap
2. Times New Roman - Crap
3. Comic Sans - Quite possibly the font of the antichrist
4. Courier New - Crap and Apple has access to Courier (the good one) anyway
5. Georgia - Decent but could be replaced with Garamond in any situation for better results
6. Impact - Futura with a missing chromosome
7. Trebuchet - I was mistaken, THIS is the font of the antichrist
8. Verdana - Doesn't Apple own their own variant of Myriad? What the hell do they need this for?
9. Andale Mono - Could be worse, but why care when you have the rights to use Monaco?
10. Webdings - wow, just wow
I sincerely hope Apple didn't spend a lot of money on this crap.
I'm guessing the "Goatse Wingding super font pack" is not on that list.
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I this is just part of an evil plot to get Mac users used to using these fonts then later MS will make you buy the vowels.
Specific fonts (or, correctly, "typefaces" - a given font is a particular incarnation of a typeface, including size, so Comic Sans 10pt is a different font to Comic Sans 12pt) shouldn't be necessary - families of typefaces maybe, if you're trying to achieve a particular style, but not fonts or even necessarily typefaces.
I spent a few years working with desktop publishing gurus turned web developers, and I heard this goddamn typeface/font distinction made all the time.
It drove me nuts, but, in the end, one of us was correct about the use of a common technical definition, and the other had sex with women.