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."

Comments

Huh?

[CrAlt]

Ive never noticed a difference from Firefox on my OSX machine and Firefox on my linux laptop. What sites are really using MS only fonts?

Re:Why was the project terminated?

[wall0159]

Exactly. That's the way it reads to me. Get it accepted as a standard, and then revoke it.

This type of behaviour should be remembered when thinking about ODF/OOXML. Seems to me that the words "Microsoft", and "standards" just don't go together, and that if you care, even remotely, about a level-software-playing-field you should be avoiding their products.

What're the MS fanboys' take on this?

You aren't a designer

[_merlin]

You, like most users, are not a designer, and don't notice the subtle differences between the proprietary fonts used on a Mac and the free (as in speech and beer) fonts used on Linux. You probably think Arial and Helvetica look the same, too. That's not necessarily a bad thing, and just highlights one reason that most people won't really care whether this license is extended or not - most people just want legible text so they can get the information.

On the other hand, I am a pedant. I pay close attention to fonts. I notice when a single character has been substituted because the specified font didn't have a glyph for a particular codepoint. But I don't care too much for this license, either. I hate Arial with a passion, and wish my Mac would substitute Helvetica, since Arial was actually designed as a Helvetica clone that cost less to license. Verdana was designed to be legible on low-resolution displays. Displays have higher resolutions now, and font rendering technologies have improved. Verdana has outlived its usefulness. Courier New is just plain ugly. I want my fixed-pitch text rendered in Monaco.

So all in all, I don't see how the extension of this license is a good thing for anyone.

Re:You aren't a designer

[mrchaotica]

Verdana was designed to be legible on low-resolution displays. Displays have higher resolutions now, and font rendering technologies have improved. Verdana has outlived its usefulness.

Hey, I like Verdana (aside from the fact that it renders larger at a given point size than other fonts). Just because it may have been designed for some particular purpose doesn't mean it isn't pretty!

Re:You aren't a designer

[grahamd0]

IAANAD (I am also not a designer), in fact, I'm a developer, so designers are both my life's blood and my mortal enemies (oh, what tragedy!).

Is it possible to explain what is so offensive about arial other than it being common and Microsoftish? I can spot the difference, and I like helvetica, but it's just honestly not that big of a deal for me.

This strikes me as one of those "menus belong on the top-left of the screen!" type of arguments, where the person making the argument claims that it's an objective statement of fact, and one can make an equally logical argument against it. Indeed, merely being able to say, "I prefer Y" makes a statement of "X is objectively better" somewhat dubious.

I'm really interested in hearing, specifically, what makes arial an unacceptable substitute. In your post, you don't actually give any single reason why arial is so offensive other than it being inexpensive, which, IMHO, is not valid in and of itself unless you're a snob attempting to appeal to other snobs.

I don't meant to imply that you're a snob. I'm sure you have good reasons for making that statement, and I would genuinely like to hear them.

Re:You aren't a designer

[Sycraft-fu]

"Displays have higher resolutions now"

Really? Which ones? When I look around, I don't see displays pushing past 100PPI much for the desktop. The most common LCDs are between about 85PPI (things like 19" 4:3s) and 100PPI (things like 20" widescreens). I just can't find any normal desktop displays, even high end graphics ones, that push past that. Only in the laptop arena do I see higher PPI and even then it caps out around 130PPI (17" 1920x1200 widescreens). Compared to print at least this is extremely low PPI and it really isn't any higher than what we've had in the past with computers. Even Apple doesn't break this trend. Their monitors are a little higher PPI than most for example their 23" is the same resolution as 24" panels, (at least until they stop buying the 23" IPS panel and go with the new 24" IPS panel that NEC is using) but we are still talking under 100PPI.

So where are the high resolution displays? I don't mean showing me something that is available for a special purpose at a big price, I mean where are the high rez displays on the market now, that a consumer might buy? I sure as hell can't find them, and I don't find that graphics systems are ready to drive them. Even high end graphics consumer cards seem to top out at 2560x1600. You are talking things like the NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 (which costs damn near $3000) before you see support for higher resolutions.

While I'll certainly agree that the over all number of pixels on desktop monitors is going up, they are doing it by getting larger, not by getting more pixels per inch. We are still in the same effective PPI range as we were when LCDs first started hitting the desktop.

Re:You aren't a designer

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes that is true, but Sonoran Sans was created as a Helvetica knockoff. Adobe was charging huge licencing fees for their proprietary format and everyone was cloning Helvetica, the most prolific typeface out there.

Re:You aren't a designer

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad Adobe has nothing to do with Helvetica. (The standard cut of Helvetica belongs to Linotype.)

See the difference

[QuantumG]

Here's a little page I whipped up with the different fonts from five different combinations of browser and OS.

Personally, I've never really been able to tell the difference between one font or another :)

You aren't a small handheld device.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Verdana was designed to be legible on low-resolution displays. Displays have higher resolutions now, and font rendering technologies have improved. Verdana has outlived its usefulness."

Let me introduce you to this new fangled device known as...a smart phone.

A question to the world:

[pizzach]

Has anyone noticed that when you use a Mac for a while, Windows fonts suddenly feel really pixelated with Cleartype?

Then if you use a PC for a while, when you come back to a Mac the fonts feel really blury?

Arial and Helvetica (was Re:You aren't a designer)

[Jon_E]

There's an excellent article here on the Arial/MS font bastardization issue.

Agreed .. I would much rather see the licensing and control flow back to the foundries like linotype who have a much better feel for layout and design than microsoft. If you're ever in NY, there's an excellent exhibit at the MoMA on Helvetica that has a 5 minute loop from Michael Price's excellent film.

Re:One of Apple's worst decisions

[moosesocks]

I don't think he's joking.

There are some beautiful typefaces out there, and Microsoft has more or less veritably shat upon the world of typography by imposing Arial and Times New Roman on the world for over a decade.

As a concession, some of the new office 2007 fonts are quite nice, and Consolas is probably one of the best fixed-width fonts out there.

Apple's built-in font collection is quite a bit better, and their font-rendering system is vastly superior to just about anything else out there.

Re:Web intended to look like a print mag, not shit

[Anonymous Coward]

> The way the Web is intended to look is like the Photoshop designs

No, the web is intended to look like the end user wants, that's why we can scale text, choose our own typefaces and override a sites style definitions. You can't do that in a raster image and only those who don't understand the web (most so-called web designers) would claim such a mockup is representative.

Re:Why was the project terminated?

[l33t.g33k]

Yes, once installed, it's available to all programs on the PC. However, many programs (especially on Linux, such as CodeWeavers/CrossOver Office and the installer for Debian) were automatically installing the fonts if they weren't already there. While that's convenient for the end user, MS felt slighted!