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Standard Web Fonts 'Updated' In Vista
BladesP9 writes "Beginning with Vista, Microsoft has updated the standard Web Core Fonts that it has used since the late 1990s. 'With the release of Windows Vista, Microsoft has unleashed something quite new on the Web — the "C" fonts; Cambria, Calibri, Candara, Consolas, Constantia, and Corbel.' The article goes on to state that 'if you're a web designer and not using Vista then this download is mandatory since it will let you see your page as your Vista users see it.' The article includes a PDF document offering visual comparisons of the old and new fonts (pdf)."
I can only see this as a bid to grab more marketshare in the web client arena. Does the world need more web fonts?
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
I saw the words "standard" and "Vista" in the same sentence and had to laugh! :-)
Say what you will about Microsoft but these fonts looks better than anything on Linux and Mac.
"Oh boy"
We knew this last year. How is this "news that matters?"
"'if you're a web designer and not using Vista then this download is mandatory since it will let you see your page as your Vista users see it."
[X] I don't run Windows, so I don't have a license to download them, you ignorant clod!
It may be "mandatory", but only in the sense that some people think Vista is "mandatory". Seeing as how Vista is dying on the vine, its not something I'm going to worry about for the next few years ...
Kevin Smith on Prince
Is there an actual article that does with that pdf?
Furthermore, "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" shall heretofore be referred to as "Collar, Consolidate, and Choke."
Thats right, I'm not seeing the web as Vista users are seeing it, because I'm seeing the web!
MS should go back and make sure Vista can copy files before it starts trying to "upgrade" every one elses' web experience.
Looking at the PDF, I see problems with some of the new fonts already. In Cambria, the horizontal bar of the lowercase letter "e" is a complete blur, as the the bar of "A". Corbel has similar problems. These issues are not visible at any zoom level with the fonts the aforementioned are intended to replace.
On the upside, Consolas looks pretty nice.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
I could swear I read about these "new and improved" fonts a few months ago.
The Consolas font is a phenomenal mono-spaced font, and I've been using it for a year or more. You can download it from MS for free but it's an exe file. Once installed though you could easily, say, move the TTF file over from your Windows virtual machine to your "real" system and have access to it there. :)
if getting these fonts is mandatory, then you better get bitstream vera sans too, because that's what i'm seeing.
Or, maybe, Vista could just use the standard fonts that already exist.
Microsoft actually released these fonts with the last Office batch, and also allows you to download them freely from MSDN (just like the T series and the V series.) This all happened about 18 months ago. Thanks for noticing. (And, yes, people should download them, because Candara is just gorgeous.)
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Times new roman is one of the ugliest fonts ever (actually, to be fair comic sans is ugliest) so it is good to know that it is being replaced.
Shouldn't standard fonts be freely available cross-platform? I don't see an .gz, .bz2, .rpm, or .deb. Or did I just miss them?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
FYI, this seems to be the article in question.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Why would web designers want to use fonts that require the use of Windows Vista to render? Isn't it bad enough that web designers have to work around all the bugs in IE?
"The article goes on to state ..."
What article? The only link is the PDF with the examples, which doesn't exactly answer my question: why is it "mandatory" to get Vista? Why can I not simply continue using the old, perfectly acceptable fonts?
The "C" fonts - all of them - look absolutely horrible if you don't have ClearType enabled.
They are quite nice (I think they replace the default Times New Roman and Arial in Office 2007) and very legible by design, but totally useless for CRT owners and LCD owners who don't like ClearType.
I don't think we're yet at the point of assuming that the vast majority of people have ClearType enabled, and won't be there for another half a decade. So, if you are making a web page of some sort, please refrain from using these new fonts - you might scare away a lot of your visitors. Verdana and Georgia (hell, even Trebuchet) are much better choices for the time being.
Glad to see Microsoft has not lost its hunger to innovate.
I know this is Slashdot and all (and no one reads the articles anyway), but we can't even pretend to read the articles in question if you don't give us a link. Sure, the PDF is great, but how about linking to the actual article?
keyword: whereisthelink
I'm not sure what the purpose of this article is other than to demonstrate possible use for the fonts. I do think the author has some trouble with the i key on his keyboard. Georgia is called "Georga" and Lucida is called "Lucidia"... It's also not even complete. I just found a more comprehensive overview of all the new Vista fonts here. I have to say that the fonts do not really look dramatically better than the ones that they are supposed to replace.
In the PDF document they keep referring to Georgia as Georga. He he he... I wonder which one they hate the most: the US state or the former Soviet republic...
Crapola
who-Cares-ia
Compatiblity-break-a-you-face-firefox-a
stuff |
Since their example didn't show it, and most tech types care, here's my take on Consolas's 1/l/I differentiation. Essentially, it's Courier New. The glyphs are practically identical. One has a sloping top, lowercase L has a flat top, and uppercase I has a bar across the top. Lucidia Console works almost the same way, except that a lowercase L has no bar on the bottom.
Contrast with my personal favorite, BitStream Vera Sans Mono: one and uppercase I work the same way, but lowercase L is notably different. This is especially useful for languages like Java where a lowercase L at the end of a number is valid and marks it as a long.
On the 0/O issue, Consolas goes with a line through the zero, Lucidia Console uses a slightly higher and narrower glyph compared with the uppercase O, and BitStream Vera Sans uses a dot in the middle.
Over all, I still prefer BitStream Vera Sans Mono for my console font. Consolas is a big improvement over previous monospaced fonts available in Windows, but BitStream Vera Sans Mono is perfectly usable and, in my opinion at least, slightly better.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Microsoft is trying to make news by announcing what they're working on, hailing it as the next great thing for the desktop PC/web/office/coffee industry, and then telling everyone to got on board the train before it starts moving.
Like others, I fail to see the news here. It's nothing new to build something and tell everyone to use it in the hopes that it becomes the next de-facto standard, or as posted above, just to get it some market share so that other developers in any field will take the new product seriously.
Business as usual.
We developers wont be fooled into being forced into vista just for 3-4 fonts. You could have done this 'update' to Xp's too, just like you "updated" xp's core files without telling anyone.
Read radical news here
Yeah, but we still have to deal with Comic Sans...
--Chemguru
I've ranted about this before.
Not everyone will have these fonts; not for a long time, anyways. Browsers will then instead use the default sans serif font (Helvetica or Arial typically). Pages viewed in Arial or Helvetica that were intended for Calibri will, at least, not look good and, at worst, be completely unreadable.
Why?
Calibri (which is the one font in the group certain to become the choice of future web developers) has a different size than, say, Arial. A 1em or 12pt or 14px tall Calibri character is going to actually be smaller than the same sized Arial character. The reason is due to the design of the font and the font's leading.
A page set at 100% (default) font size that looks good in Calibri will look oversized in Arial or Helvetica. Furthermore any sort of soft-alignments between texts or text and other page elements will break. For example the content you expect to appear "above the fold" or appear shorter than an image you've got aligned to the right will now be pushed below the fold or below the height of the image, creating an page layout for someone using a stock browser.
Let's take a shot in the dark here. Now these fonts are installed as part of Office 2007. They're part of Vista. They're not part of XP unless you either have Office 2007 or the 2007 compatibility pack installed. Let's say 5% of all internet browsing computers are Vista and 75% are XP. How many of those 75% have Office 2007 or the compatibility pack (which isn't automatically downloaded via windows update, requiring the user go and download it). I think a more than fair value is that 25% of those 75% have Office 2007 or the compatibility pack installed. That equals out to about 25% of all computer users have Calibri support right now. If you design with Calibri you're ignoring 75% of your user base.
In 3-5 years that number, I believe, will drastically increase to the point where the majority will support Calibri. But not now. So don't design with it.
Feel free to pass these and other fonts around as you wish, entirely guilt-free.
Federal Register, Vol. 53, No 189 (coralized 4 Mbyte PDF)
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It does. All the same fonts that used to be there are still there. If a web page specifies Arial, you still get Arial. It's not as if MS have removed the old standard fonts and are redirecting calls from the old ones to the new ones.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
If you ask me, all fonts besides Courier New and Arial are superfluous. I guess you could also have a proportional serif font, but I wouldn't use it.
Maybe that's why I'm not a web designer.
I metamoderate, therefore I am
5 of those are cars and the last one is a wine.
"I wish to God these calculations would have been made by steam." -Charles Babbage
How many more MS supposed news 'snippets' are coming between now & the release of Leopard?
Can we just get it over with, and pre-tag them all 'noise', since all these are intended to do is dilute Apple's newest OS release?
To state what a few people have skirted around but no-one's said explicitly: This Story Is Bollocks . All the same old web standard fonts are still included in Vista. Calls to them are in no way, shape, or form redirected to the new fonts. If you specify Times New Roman, or Arial, or Verdana, etc., Vista users will see it rendered exactly the same as anyone else; in the same fonts as everyone else. There's no need for web designers to download the new fonts to "let you see your page as your Vista users see it", because Vista users will see it the same as everyone else sees it.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
and yet your post is written in it?
oh wait heh
i um, i uh like comic sans
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
'if you're a web designer and not using Vista then this download is mandatory since it will let you see your page as your Vista users see it.' Yeah, all three Vista users...
wasn't that legolas's brother in lotr?
and isn't constantia the medical term for constant constipation?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I only work with Dingbats
photosMy Photostream
So it's taken about 10 years for them to get to the C's. At this rate, we will have the entire alphabet of fonts by 2100 or Windows XL. Whichever comes first. :P
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Maybe if we could just convince them to install the Liberation fonts instead:
https://www.redhat.com/promo/fonts/
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
Cambria looks way mushier than Georgia, which I thought was one of the best screen fonts ever.
On a lark. I downloaded the C family and installed it on my PowerBook. Font Book on Mac OS X complained that Cambria was damaged, but gave the unhelpful description "System Validation."
So this makes me curious:
Is there a font verification tool in Windows XP SP2?
Does Cambria fail there?
using these new fonts is a recipe for typographical disaster on something like 95% of computers.
text is right, subject is wrong
.monospacefont {
font-family: Calibri, monospace;
}
Should break pages requiring mono-spaced fonts for only vista users. Making new "standards" go both ways.
Is it just me, or do most of those fonts look exactly the same bold as regular? How stupid is that?
Also, they seem to look blurry...
And someone already mentioned that the fonts render size differently, too... I know HTML is supposed to be dynamic and all, but the size of the font is a pretty important thing when designing a page.
If I were designing a page and wanted it to have a different font, I'd be a lot more likely to suggest someone download fonts that actually look good (ones that I specify) and fallback to the known fonts if they haven't than specify Vista's fonts.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Why care what your page looks like on Vista. Let the people running vista worry about that.
Think Deeply.
To my eyes, none of the fonts appear to be a clear improvement over the others. Even if they are, I can't seeing them replace the corefonts because there just isn't enough of a difference for untrained eyes.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
"If you're a web designer and not using Vista then this download is mandatory since it will let you see your page as your Vista users see it."
Now why would I want to do that when the majority of web users are using XP? Besides, if you are designing things properly, you shouldn't care what fonts your users are using.
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
the "C" fonts; Cambria, Calibri, Candara, Consolas, Constantia, and Corbel.
The fonts look nice enough, but their names suck.
Why not refer to Cambria as Times Newer Roman? Consolas could be called Courier Newer.
Following the links given earlier, I downloaded PowerPointViewer into XP (running in Parallels on a Mac) and launched it.
It immediately presents a license agreement which I actually looked at (for a change) and find these points:
The combination of these would seem to absolutely rule out my doing any of:
Since these are all and only what I would have used them for, I declined to accept the terms and deleted the download. Feh.
I mean, they're not the standard, they're the defaults. The standards haven't changed...
If your design depends on fonts being a particular size in order to lay out other elements or to have things "above the fold", you're doing it wrong.
I normally browse in Firefox with the minimum font size set to 20. Well-designed pages handle this just fine, and poorly-designed pages (mostly the bigger-budget ones) handle it badly.
If you are a web designer, won't you either:
1) Be specifying specific fonts on the assumption that your users will (a) have them, and (b) have their user-agent configured to respect the fonts specified on your page, or
2) Be not specifying specific fonts, on the assumption that your users will be presented the fonts they prefer.
In the first case, unless you specify the new MS fonts, you don't need them to see what your users will see on Vista or elsewhere; in the second, you have no idea what your users may see, since there is a near-infinite area of possible settings they could be using, though the MS core fonts will let you see what people using IE under Vista will see in the default settings.
(Incidentally, the fonts are also bundled with Office 2007, and quite likely users without Vista have them, and some probably use them as their default fonts for web browsing.)
Now, there could be a royalty issue with this, but in any case, I know I won't be using these fonts.
Not if I just block the 0.5% of people using vista to access my site and tell them to upgrade and/or fuck off.
These fonts might be nice, but FreeType makes a complete hash of them. I tried Consolas at various sizes and FreeType makes the vertical lines variously too light and too dark. A sentence looks like a ransom note.
In the positive column for free software, Wine was able to run the PowerPoint installer perfectly.
In my view, the best fonts were the 100dpi bitmap fonts, followed by Tahoma, and Terminus with antialiasing off, and full-hinting enabled.
Until we get 600dpi monitors, I (and about 20% of the world) will definitely stick with sharpness and readability instead of the blurry hack that is antialiasing. However, some fonts are meant to be hinted but not antialiased, and others are designed for antialiasing but not hinting. Which are these?
Cabextract the installer, but don't cabextract the .cab inside the installer because the files you get are unreadable. If you can, cabextract the installer and then use Windows Explorer to open up the .cab and extract the fonts (.ttf, .ttc).
This comment just makes me barf: 'if you're a web designer and not using Vista then this download is mandatory since it will let you see your page as your Vista users see it.'
Well, it was a good run while it lasted. HTML, your role as a presentation-agnostic information medium has come to an end. We've got morons all over the world writing HTML to make precise renditions on specific browsers with specific fucking fonts. May you rest in piece (or little itty bitty pieces).
"As my users see it" == "without any of those fonts"
-- Boycott Shell
I can't see much of a difference between them, why are people flipping out like this is the second coming of Christ? Sure, some have less/more weight but WTF is the difference?
-Not a web designer/graphic artist
Finally a compelling reason to reason to upgrade to Vista!
Why should we actually change? Arial, Courier and the lot have served well enough. What problem is Microsoft trying to fix?
"Constantia can replace ... Helvetica".
Ah, I think not. Nobody will ever make a film about Constantia - http://www.helveticafilm.com/
Maybe one will be made about Comic Sans, but it will be a horror story.
I just downloaded the fonts, and installed them on my mac, where I am now using consolas to write a rails application that will be bundled as a WAR file and deployed in a Java application server.
That isn't against any terms of service for a font from Microsoft, is it?
That is what everything is displayed as on my browser. I have it set to ignore all fonts from the site and simply use verdana: sizes 8-12
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
Personally I try to design the page so that it doesn't rely on a particular font, and then I don't specify it in the stylesheet. There are lots of users who may want to change the font for various reasons. If your vision isn't perfect you may want something that is high-contrast. Depending on your monitor size and resolution you may find different fonts to be more legible at the same size, etc...
I guess if you are doing something which has to look "just right" then this may not be an option, but I like to make the webpage so that it has some "breathing space" as you never know what crazy combination of font size, screen resolution and custom fonts the user will force through his browser. Oh, and while we are at it, pretty please, don't fix the font size to some $tiny value. Yea, there are workarounds, but it is a nuisance nevertheless.
I would say that is off by a factor of ten.
vi +
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
Then you won't have to test your site with all the browsers known to man.
If the brower doesn't render standards properly then make them fix it.
Didn't I see this in Monty Python and the Holy Grail?
"I have a good friend in Rome named Biggus Dickus. And my friend has a wife. Do you know what her name is? Constantia. Constantia Buttocks."
The summary is quite misleading.
1) Web Core Fonts were free to download, these are not. Windows XP/2000 users can install them by installing PowerPoint Viewer, which is beer (as in free).
2) Web Core Fonts were Microsoft's plan to provide interoperability. The new fonts were designed to work better with IE's (and Vista's) new rendering engine.
3) This isn't news, I read about it at least six months ago. I've been using the fonts on XP for at least four months.
Indeed, a quick search on Digg reveals that the news is very, very old.
I viewed the PDF showing the font differences, and I saw no reason at all to change. The new fonts are no better and no worse than the old fonts. They're just different, apparently for no other purpose than to be different.
Tahoma is better and more readable then all of them,though consolas is decent.
I don't use IE, just firefox, and I have the same version of firefox on WinXP as I do on Fedora 4 / Gnome. I have been used to the default fonts on both systems, but the winXP always looked terrible. So I just checked the windows setup and it was using Times New Roman - Uuurgh.
So, I changed it to reflect what the Fedora system is using - Bitstream Vera Sans, which I am very happy with ( I don't "do" the net on WinXP usually, so this was just for a test.) Result, crappy rendering on WinXP. So expecting to have some idea of what a site will look like on another system is IMHO a bit hopeful.
Have a look yourself, open each of these links in a separate tab and contrast and compare.
Windows
Fedora
The layout may differ slightly, as I don't have the browser maximised in either screen shot, but you can see the difference in the appearance of the font. (And yes, I do have mod points left)
Is it just me, or does it seem a little off that they have different fonts for replacing Arial and Helvetica, given that Arial was a replacement for Helvetica?
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
And Linux can serve as a replacement for NT x.xx..
GNU can replace XP/Vista/Windows 7
FSF can replace Microsoft
The best part is, looking at the PDF, in both Calibri and Arial you cannot tell a lowercase l (ELL) from an uppercase I (EYE).
Why did they do that again? Nooo!
Turns out Consolas was already an available font so I'm trying it out in Eclipse. At size 10 it is smaller than Courier New so I'm trying to get used to it, setting it to size 11 is a little too big, but not much more than Courier New. Imagine I see 31 lines of code with Courier New size 10, I see 35 with Consolas size 10 and 29 lines with Consolas size 11.
Also turns out I didn't have ClearType on, so now I'm getting used to that too. Everything looks really weird, honestly not sure if I like it or not yet, but no headaches yet. Consolas looks great with ClearType on, and with ClearType off I actually didn't think it looked too bad, and didn't even realize I had it off until I saw my "M" and they looked really messed up. Gonna stick with it at least for the rest of the day.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Please use another operating system.
Get OFFA MY LAWN!!!
In the PDF examples, the font's line spacing is different. Are the fonts being presented notionally equal in size? It's easy to claim something is more readable even if it's only fractionally larger in line spacing or character size.
Less is more.
"Caca". Or "Crapia". Or "Cholesterol" for bold.
If everything you know is courier, it can be true.
;)
I just tried consolas in my favorite text editor and it sucks compared to Lucida Console. Too small, too much space unused.
It has however a very nice comma glyph
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
Spanish is my first language, and I am very glad to note that this time the designers seem to have paid more attention to "foreign" (i.e. : non ascii) characters.
In particular, the opening exclamation-interrogation signs, in the previous font set (Verdana, Georgia, Tahoma) were just horrible, they were above the baseline making them almost equal to an 'i' letter. See for example here. They were ok in TimesNewRoman and Arial, though. And they are nice in this C-set. Bravo.
Ahh Consolas, my new favorite font. It's the best font for development I've seen. I used to be a fan of Courier New but now when I see it I think "ick, thats so 20th century!".
You never see Apple or Google giving back to the community like this.
1. Download the PowerPointViewer.exe from the link in the article. /extract:complete-path-to-test-folder"
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=048DC840-14E1-467D-8DCA-19D2A8FD7485&displaylang=en
2. Open a DOS window, go to where the PowerPointViewer.exe file is, and create a directory called test.
3. Type the command "PowerPointViewer
4. Using WinRAR, look into the CAB file and extract all font files.
If you're too lazy to do that, try this link:
http://technical-writing.dionysius.com/resources/vista-fonts.zip
They look beautiful on my current monitor, and are a big improvement. All hail the new better standard.
technical writing / development
To me there's a huge difference between fonts used to typeset documents meant to be print, fonts used to display webpage (.ttf fonts, that may be anti-aliased / sub-pixel-anti-aliased by your system) and the monospaced font that I use in all my text environments (xterm, emacs, my favourite IDE). And this comes as a comment from someone who is mainly a programmer but also happened to typeset books (both using Quark XPress and... LaTeX!).
.ttf fonts are cute but not a single of them compare to a real "programmer font". Google for "proggy fonts" and see what some programmers came up with. Basically these are pixel perfect fonts, not meant to be anti-aliased. There are some wrappers if you want to have them in .ttf format.
All the monospaced
In my experience you've overshot the mark significantly. I know about 3 people with Office 2007, and I never even heard of the compatibility pack before today.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
Of course, none of this would be a problem if we could actually attach fonts to web-pages.
You USE Comic Sans?!?
Why the hell would ANYONE over the age of 11 use Comic Sans?!?!
I bet you still use "flash" tags too!
You need to DIE VIOLENTLY for this blatant sin against the Internet!!
I'm not an expert on such things, but I would have thought it would shoot up to 90% just as soon as Microsoft decides to push it out as an automatic Windows update. The conspiracy nuts might even claim that web developers would be encouraged not to bother about the remaining 10% of other platforms as soon as this happens, although I personally think there's more awareness of non-Windows platforms these days.
Why would anyone, anywhere, ever let a website pick what font you see? That's almost as bad as letting a website pick what colors the text and background are.
Looks like msttcorefonts are going to release new version of their fonts extraction tool.
Correct me if i'm wrong, but none of these fonts don't have any support for any languages except the most common European ones.
They support Latin characters with some extensions, enough for most of Europe, but ignoring Vietnamese and many other languages.*
They support Cyrillic with very little extensions, so Russians, Ukrainians, Serbs and Belarusians can use them, but the emerging economies of Kazakhstan and Tatarstan and other post-Soviet regions are left behind.
And they also support Greek. And that's it.
All these are absent: Arabic, Hebrew, Georgian, Armenian, Thai, Devanagari, Tamil. Hundreds of millions of people in countries with important IT industries can't benefit from these fonts. This is so 1997. As if Unicode never happened and the world is still stuck with ASCII and ISO-8859. As if successful and massively multilingual Unicode-based projects, such as Wikipedia don't exist. Essentially, nothing has changed since 1997, except that the letters look arguably nicer.
One of the great things about the good old Arial, Tahoma, Courier New and Times New Roman was that they included a rather rich set of scripts outside the default European domain. It may not make a lot of sense from the point of view of typography traditionalists, as the people who developed the original Times typeface, for example, didn't have Hebrew and Thai in mind; But it is very convenient for a lot of people around the globe to write a document in Times New Roman and then to send them to people without worrying that the recipient won't have the necessary font.
That's just one of the reasons why i don't expect the transition to those new fonts to be quick.
* That includes native languages of Nigeria. Keeping Nigerians away from computers may prove as a sensible strategy...
Who cares how my vista users see my web page
..actually wait if I'm selling used condoms or something maybe I should care how my site looks to them... hrmm...
They obviously do not care about their own computer or themselves, or are retarded.
I always liked Vera Sans Mono but it was missing some unicode characters (for example, the hyphens that show up at the end of a line in man pages). So long as you use ClearType, DejaVu Sans Mono is the perfect monospace terminal font.
IMO, Lucida Console still looks better with no antialiasing (but only at 10-point and above! Why do 0 and O look the same in Lucida console 9-point???)
Hands in my pocket
Licenses to use these fonts in other applications on up to five computers can be purchased from Ascender Corporation for $35 per font, $120 per font family, or $300 for the whole set.
Press release
I have one word for you, naive windows user, for a place; a font; a state of perfection in the monospace universe:
Monaco
Added all the C fonts and Font Book never complained.
Problem solved. No new fonts needed.
Have gnu, will travel.
> Cambria can serve as a replacement to both Georgia and Times New Roman
Unlikely. It has a worse (taller) aspect ratio than Georgia and doesn't look nearly as good in italic, and it's about fifty orders of magnitude shy of being as ubiquitous as TNR. (I'm not sure there is *any* other font as ubiquitous as TNR, or has ever been. Of course TNR is ugly, but nobody uses it because it looks good.)
> Calibri can replace Arial.
Again, Arial is at this point fairly ubiquitous, probably the third or fourth most ubiqitous font for all time, after TNR, Helvetica, and possibly Courier. (Courier is not very ubiqitous now, but in the bad old days before TrueType, the days of non-scalable screen fonts and separate printer fonts, it was.)
> Candara can replace Trebuchet MS and Helvetica.
Eh, maybe. Trebuchet is not very widly used in any case (though it is visibly heavier than Candara, which in some cases would be desirable; OTOH, Candara has a nicer italic), and Helvetica at this point is mostly a Mac font (though historically it was more widespread and important). Then again, do we _need_ a replacement for these fonts? Who uses them anyway?
> Consolas can replace Lucidia Console and Courier New
If Courier New could be replaced with a better-looking font, it would have been many times over, because just about every other fixed-width font *EVER* is better looking. As for Lucidia Console, I've never heard of it. (There's Lucida Console...)
> Can replace Georga and Palatino
Never heard of Georga. (Georgia? I thought Cambria was to replace that?)
> Corbel can replace Verdana.
It's hard to compare them, because the creator of the comparison document neglected to scale Verdana down a size so that it would roughly match the size of the other font. (Verdana runs about a size larger than most other fonts, e.g., Verdana 10 is about the same size as Arial 11. Dunno why Verdana runs large, it just does. I guess the font foundry made it that way. It's a nice enough font to make up for this, though. Looks better than Arial.)
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
That's not the problem.
A common technique for web designers is to use CSS "small" size for body text. The main reason for this is browser's default font size is too large. See Size Matters for the history.
If the font chosen is Arial, small is fine. If the font chosen is Calibri, small is arguably too hard to read. All the other fonts are similarly small. Screenshot.
Your basic style sheet choices are:
Things would have been much easier if Microsoft had just made their new fonts look the same size as other fonts.
Andale Mono kicks Consolas' ass. No comparison. Consolas looks horrific on an LCD without Cleartype.
Sounds like someone that is writing HTML to be like a PDF.
Shouldn't matter the font you are using -- write valid HTML code and let the browser do its job rather than trying to force the formatting.
"... even Chuck Bigelow's Lucida has been supplanted."
.CAB file.
I just tried the Consolas font, and I like it better than Lucida Console, my previous favorite font for programming.
Here's how to get the fonts: Download Microsoft Powerpoint Viewer. It is 25 Megabytes. View the file, PowerPointViewer.exe, in WinZip or another archive viewer, such as the excellent, free, open source, Windows, Linux, OS X, 7-Zip. Then view the file inside the archive, ppviewer.cab. The fonts are inside the
I want consolas on my DOS box!
Any way to convince MSDOS 6.21 to use a graphical font?
If I display for example the glyphs of Consolas Regular in InDesign, I see one very strange character with GID 708 but no unicode number. GIDs 585 and 586 look very similar to unicodes 02D8 () and 0306 (), but they are also displayed without unicode number in InDesign.
I have been partial to hanging numbers, becausing writing numbers in block form is like writing words in capitals. Candara and Corbel are sans serif fonts, a welcome addition, while Constantia and Georgia remain serif hanging-digit fonts.
None of the fonts are 'old-style'. These are recognisable by a half-width e. Still, some of the c-fonts do add interesting variations to what is already there.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
Here's how these "improved" fonts are rendered by Linux (freetype 2.3.4 with FT_CONFIG_OPTION_SUBPIXEL_RENDERING and TT_CONFIG_OPTION_BYTECODE_INTERPRETER and libXft-2.1.12):
spapshot.
Why do you assume that the default font setting in a browser for 100% size looks different in Helvetica than in Calibri? Perhaps the developers actually know their stuff and the default in Helvetica would be 14px, whereas in Calibri 15/16px? On my system, 100% is 18px Helvetica and it sure does not look oversized to me.
When will people learn to embrace the differences between 100% fonts on different systems?
Yesterday was the time to do it right. Are we having a REVOLUTION yet?
Nothing can replace Helvetica. It is an international standard. That other font looks downright horrid.
See CSS2 feature font-size-adjust . It allows you to tell browser about the ratio between the x-height and font-size. From the spec:
The idea is that you provide the ratio for the preferred font and if that is not available, the browser is supposed to scale the replacement font (using the ratio given by font-size-adjust and the ratio available from replacement font's properties) so that it has visually the intended size.
Too bad that CSS2 is not implemented by browsers. The same applies for that new feature you suggested (which results to pretty much similar behavior).
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