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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)."
We knew this last year. How is this "news that matters?"
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. :)
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
FYI, this seems to be the article in question.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Here you go:
http://www.hunlock.com/blogs/Downloading_and_Using_Vista_Web_Fonts
The issue you speak of does not occur on my monitor either. Perhaps you have a PDF rendering issue?
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.
Turns out these fonts need a little leg work to get hold of, if you aren't using Vista. This page explains how to get hold of them 'legally':
.exe format, you will need to use something like Wine or Crossover, if you don't have access to a Windows PC.
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/03/download-windows-vista-fonts-legally.html
Since the downloads are in
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Don't most Linux and Mac users snag the default windows fonts anyway?
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.
Truth. Consolas is my monofont everywhere. Its the best programming font I have ever found. The rest of the fonts though are quite meh.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There is something wrong on your side. It looks fine on both my systems (and tried looking at 66%, 75%, 100%, 116% etc).
I really liked Calibri and Consolas BTW.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Consolas with no antialiasing
Painful, isn't it? All the new fonts are apparently designed and specially hinted to make use of Cleartype (Microsoft's antialiasing & subpixel rendering algorithm). So they look beautiful with Cleartype on, alright with non-cleartype greyscale antialiasing (example), and "Aah! My eyes! The googles, they do nothing!" with no antiaiasing.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
Out of the iso my ubuntu install fonts are up to par with my mac. Meanwhile my xp machine at work fonts look terrible now that I'm used to mac and linux and my soon to parted out vista box is just slightly better but no where near the mac or linux.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
One laptop WXGA with XP/cleartype, the other a desktop with a 22" 1900x1280 screen running Sabayon/Compiz.
The problem's not specifically with the subpixel rendering. It's because they've reduced the size of the lower-case type, then hinted the horizontals to try to make them more legible. It's a nice theory, but in practice, it makes text in those fonts more tiring to read.
Basically, it looks like change for change's sake, not to make life better for computer users.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
ahhh... but it is a little known fact that CGA adapters are capable of displaying 16 colours. And, if you connected it to a TV, you could even get many more different colours (about 100) by getting the colours to smear together creating new ones.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
Postscript Type 1 still rules the roost.
Erm... No, sorry. All of the big foundries now supply pretty much their entire collection in OpenType format, and several are moving towards only supplying new fonts in this format. If you're not aware of this, a little reading around the usual web typography forums will soon show you the direction things are moving in.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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.
Technically that's tracking. Leading is the space between lines of text.
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
Four? I'm happy with three: red, green and blue.
(And various combinations thereof, but hey ...)
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
No fonts were removed in Vista. All the "Web core fonts" are still there, and so is Tahoma and other Win-specific fonts. They have only added the 7 new ones (the "C*" bunch, and Segoe UI). Segoe UI is the new default UI font instead of Tahoma (though this isn't consistent even in Windows system dialogs - some still use Tahoma, and some still use MS Sans Serif). Calibri is used as a default document font in Office 2007 applications. IE7 on Vista still uses Arial as a generic sans-serif font and Times New Roman as serif font, by default.
Why ClearType is broken, for those that are unawares. ClearType does optimize for a certain manner of on-screen presentation, but the cost is that font sizes and weight are completely screwed up and what you see is definitely not what will print.
It's only a holy war between people who don't do high-DPI outputs for a living.
And of course OpenType is itself a technology that Microsoft has been heavily involved in supporting, and is basically the de facto standard format for all professional fonts now.As another pointed out, it's a standard only if you ignore Word documents as a delivery medium, which is a bit impractical (even if desirable).
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
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...
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