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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."
Perhaps, after 6 years, MS realized it had achieved font lock-in?
It seems to me, if you give something out, then its out, and not yours to later revoke.
btw, the submission is verbatim cut from the source article, nice job 'editting'.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Times New Roman, Arial and Verdana are all horrible fonts. I'd rather have my Mac automatically substitute decent fonts when they're specified. Isn't the point of HTML, and hence the web, to specify the structure of a document rather than its appearance? Shouldn't the appearance depend on my preferences?
Just kidding...seriously, I agree that if you give something to the web community as an act of goodwill, that goodwill pretty much evaporates (and then some) when you start tugging on the attached strings.
A web designer should never assume that the user has any specific fonts on their machine. If your site doesn't look good with any serif,sans-serif, and monospace fonts, that I choose to use, then you didn't do a very good job with it. There's some other nice fonts, like fantasy, and cursive, that I would try to stay away from. Stick to the first 3 I mentioned, and stop worrying about whether or not you site looks exactly the same on everyone elses computer/browser as it does on yours. Because it never will.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.
Trying to nail presentation of a presentation language down to specific fonts or typefaces is about as sensible as demanding your viewer's browser window be 800x600. If you absolutely can't live without your web-based masterpiece being presented in point-perfect font specifivity, present it as a
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
Unless you mean the problem to lock-in. In which case...
While we are well aware it's not public domain, the argument here is that it should be. Damn, do we need to be as explicit as lawyers here?From what I can tell (not that I've looked into this at all), MS said that these fonts would be safe to use on the web because everyone would have them. In other words, it would be a standard. In that sense, they are definitely to blame for revoking it (or, as you would like to put it, defining-it-as-a-standard-and-then-charging-for-th e-use-of).
Maurice Wilkes, debugging, 1949
The first thing you have to know about Microsoft's and Apple's attempts at clearer type is that Windows ClearType breaks each pixel into three sub-pixels sitting side by side, and thus only uses the horizontal axis, whereas Apple softens the sharp lines both horizontally and vertically.
This means that at large sizes, where you might not even be able to discern individual pixels all that well, OSX font smoothing looks great. It smooths things all the way around rather than in just one direction.
Remember, though, that pixels consist (in general) of red, green, and blue side-by-side (left, center, and right). You can't break a pixel into top, center, and bottom sub-pixels unless you rotate your screen 90 degrees..
At small sizes, though, Windows' system assures that the height of characters is a fixed, integral number of pixels. Unlike with OSX, in horizontal lines a line of black pixels will definitely be present. The middles of the letters B and E at an 8-pixel-high font size, for example, will probably have (vertically from the top) black, white, white, black, white, white, white, black. (Forget serifs for now.) The Mac will attempt to "smooth" those lines out even though there's not much space in which to do it (since you can't break a pixel vertically). Thus you get horizontal lines that become halftone grays as the renderer battles bravely to get "smooth" lines without regard for the increased difficulty of vertical smoothing.
Apple doesn't seem to expect people to attempt smooth fonts at sizes below about 9 or 10, if you look at the System Preferences. Windows will smooth them out for you at any size.
I find myself wishing for Windows-style ClearType at small sizes, and on the Mac I end up simply viewing the Web and word processing documents at immense font sizes rather than strain my eyes on the gray blurs. That's fine in these days when 1024x768 has become a small screen resolution, but it is a waste of resolution. I'd rather fit a lot more on that big screen! But I suspect that Apple's system will come out ahead as screen resolutions (both in DPI and in total) increase and we have less and less need to actually see 7-pixel-high text.