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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 saw the words "standard" and "Vista" in the same sentence and had to laugh! :-)
We knew this last year. How is this "news that matters?"
Well I'm still using a CGA adapter. Does the world need more than 4 colors?
Furthermore, "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" shall heretofore be referred to as "Collar, Consolidate, and Choke."
Basically they are slightly smaller and lighter in weight. That's about it.
There are lots of better fonts than the 'standard' web fonts. The web font are standard because everyone has them, and so they can be relied upon. When these fonts are freely avalible and routinely installed on 90+% of computers they might be acceptable to use instead of what's currently in use. Until then the point is that everyone has the 'standards'.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
Regardless of whether you're right or not (about grabbing back marketshare), the fonts that they're introducing aren't all that bad in themselves. Although I recognize that it's probably a subjective judgment, I think that the new set of fonts are more readable. For example, I think Calibiri and Candara are easier to read than Arial and Helvetica, respectively.
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.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
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
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...
"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.
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
Typography and hardware are two areas where Microsoft truly excels. The one thing they don't do well is producing software.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, but we still have to deal with Comic Sans...
--Chemguru
Damn kids, can't even whistle a carrier anymore, how are they going to check their email on the road ?
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
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.
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
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.
A typeface design is uncopyrightable, however the specific expression of a design as a digital font, _including_ the selection of curve points can be copyrighted.
http://directory.serifmagazine.com/Ethics_and_Law/Copyright/judgement.php4
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
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.
Not all of the fonts are intended for all purposes. We use Cambria on some printed materials and it looks nice. Constantia is great printed, too.
Segoe UI, also part of Vista, is also a great UI font in my opinion. We use it on our Intranet and continue to get compliments from the older staff. Arial and the other standard web fonts just aren't that usable for short, concise bits of text you find in user interfaces.
Turn in your geek card at the door, we geeks don't ever hit the road, unless by road you mean the hallway between the basement and the kitchen.
Please point your blame in a different direction. CSS 2.0 had perfectly good support for this, but no browser vendors implemented it, so it was taken out of CSS 2.1.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
"""This page explains how to get hold of them 'legally':"""
Ok, then click the link to download powerpoint viewer and what do you see?
You may use the fonts that accompany the PowerPoint Viewer only to display and print content from a device running a Microsoft Windows operating system. Additionally, you may do the following:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=048DC840-14E1-467D-8DCA-19D2A8FD7485&displaylang=en
I guess it depends on what you define as legal (is a EULA legal for example).
Artists against online scams http://www.aa419.org/
I only work with Dingbats
photosMy Photostream
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
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
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?
Although I recognize that it's probably a subjective judgment, I think that the new set of fonts are more readable.
Actually, it's not entirely subjective. The new fonts were designed to work well with Microsoft's ClearType anti-aliasing technology. This means the fonts can be a bit more adventurous about their design and hinting, and if you're using a flatscreen where ClearType improves the perceived resolution, you might get smoother rendering and at smaller font sizes. CRT users on Windows are basically out of luck on this one, and will just see another font that might even not look as good as the previous generation fonts at unfortunate sizes. I can't comment on how well any smart font rendering technology will handle these on Macs and Linux, but if MS are going to be giving them away with no strings attached at some point (what else makes sense if you want to establish a web font?) then they're probably worth a look.
Speaking as a programmer, I think the set is worth having just for Consolas. Speaking as someone familiar with graphic design and typography, I quite like Calibri and Corbel for on-screen use, though they have one or two unfortunate artifacts at common sizes that spoil them a bit, particularly for web pages where you can't control the size reliably and in any case you can't rely on your visitor having the fonts installed yet. Candara I'm not so keen on, as things like Optima use similar principles to better effect IMHO, and in any case those tricks don't really work well on-screen. I don't like either of the new serif faces at all. They're clunky, and even at their best sizes, offer little over something like Georgia for on-screen use or numerous established fonts for high-res printing. Also, things like using old-style numerals by default in a general purpose screen font, so o (oh) and 0 (zero) are visually almost identical, has been shown to result in a near-100% misrecognition rate when viewed in an ambiguous context and is therefore pretty dumb. Typographic details like old-style numerals have their place, but that place is to be used in the right context where they make things easier to read, not to be used everywhere regardless.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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.
Dude, you have no idea on what you're missing out.
I've got SIXTEEN colors on my screen! EGA power!
Now, the question is, will we ever need more than 16 colors? Yes, I've heard about a 256-colors standard coming up in a few months, but that's just ridiculous...
How do you get to cons?
I am using Mandriva "out of the box" (except I may have deleted a few fonts) and the fonts look fine to me.
The main problem is that there are a few really crappy looking fonts, and when they substitute for a Windows font it looks terrible. The best solution is probably to delete them.
I am not sure what you mean by "dick around with internals": installing and removing fonts and changing anti-aliasing settings are done through reasonable GUI in most dsitros.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
You mean without a car? first.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
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.
Actually, the Microsoft Typography people are pretty good, and the new wave of OpenType fonts are pretty good about supporting things like ligatures. 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.
The Windows vs. MacOS anti-aliasing debate is a holy war so I'm not going there. But in terms of poor support for typography, it's not Windows that's the problem. Even Notepad in WinXP could deal with OpenType. It's just that flagship applications like Word can't, because despite BillG's grand announcement a few years ago about how important this all is (and the readability and accessibility research that agrees with him) the Office team didn't consider it enough of a priority to get it working in 2007.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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.
Probably not one distinguishable from just "viewing the entire web" to start with.
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."
"You're not much of a web designer then. A good web designer checks how his/her work looks on as many platforms as possible. Just flipping the bird to Vista users because you don't like Vista, or because you think it's irrelevant, is poor practice, imho."
And that's what separates programmers from "web monkeys" or "web designers". You should design your pages for content, not specific fonts. There is no guarantee that a specific font is available on any particular platform, and there is NO need to do "browser sniffing" or "shimming" or "wedging" if you use your head and work on content instead of "gee, I want it to look pretty".
If you want pages that have specific sizes, renderings, etc., use pdf, not html/xhtml. So, tell us again why we should code to Windows IE when we can code to the standard?
Kevin Smith on Prince
Heh. I Freudian-slipped there with "piece" vs. "peace." May you rest in pieces!
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
"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 have an Apple II. Can you move something half a pixel to the left?
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
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.
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.
Anybody who designs for the web should be well aware that you can't rely on how things will look on someone else's computer. Things such as DPI setting, font overrides, missing fonts, screen height and width, monitor quality (might LCD at work shows most light grey and yellow colors as the same as white), and probably a bunch of other factors I'm forgetting about. It's ok to design with a specific set of fonts and other things in mind, but remember to check your designs under the various conditions I've mentioned above, so that your site doesn't fall apart if the user has a different setup than you do.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
That's true. 6.4 colors should indeed be enough for anybody!
The problem is that overthinking your design to this extent will always result in failure. At some point, somebody is going to see your content with the font appearing a big larger, or smaller, due to something like DPI setting, or even because their vision is bad, and they jack up the font size by default. So just get over it, and stop trying to create print layouts that are accurate to the pixel on the web. It's never going to be perfect.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
One thing thats great with Consolas, is if you`re NOT in an environment that limits the length of a line of code. Consolas is very compact horizontally too. I have a widescreen monitor, so you can fit quite a lot on one line.
Can't abuse it of course, but if you use Eclipse, the odds are good you do Java (even though it doesn't garentee it), and you probably seen the random 3rd party API that has classes like SomeObjectThatDoesSomeStuffTranslatingFromOneClassToTheOtherAndStuff.
Consolas helps a lot in these cases. Also totally wonderful for HTML and XML.
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.
Type 1 faces *scale*. You'd be hard pressed to use anything else for film output (2500 dpi+) on a Linotronic.
But their weekness is they don't look as good on lower resolution devices like computer screens. That's where the other technologies that are hand tuned have a slight edge.
Need Mercedes parts ?
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
Even this guy?
(+ 1 'funny)