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Um, NO. There are a TON of differences between Bitstream Vera Sans and Segoe.

Maybe you should actually try comparing them side-by-side first before making such a stupid post.

And Vera has nothing to do with this article.

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Moving on... I think this is something Microsoft has traditionally done really well with -- fonts. Granted, Segoe does seem like it's pretty much a copy of the one mentioned in the post above mine. Regardless, there are still 6 other completely new fonts that are very beautiful.

Edited 2006-06-05 19:03

None of the fonts are original. They are but pure rip-off.

Proof?

Don't you get it? It's the "let's flame MS game" and you're not playing by the rules!

Follow the other link.

Go take a look at font collections presented on the internet and you'll realize that these fonts are identical to designs from the 1950'es and onward.

Segoe: yes
The others: umm no. Even if the styles are similar, these are designed specifically with ClearType in mind. The hinting and what have you are optimized.

Either way, either provide direct comparisons for the other fonts being "rip offs" or stop making the claims please.

Take Candara.

That's a redesign of a font from the 1930'es. It may not be theft in the legal sense, but that is irrelevant in regard to whether it's a rip-off.

a font from the 1930s? What font? You can't just expect people to know exactly what you are talking about.

That's a redesign of a font from the 1930'es. It may not be theft in the legal sense, but that is irrelevant in regard to whether it's a rip-off.

Give us some evidence, a comparison, and I'll take the rip-off factor into account. As for now, I side with sappyvcv.

Maybe you should actually try comparing them side-by-side first before making such a stupid post

Yep, where do I download these fonts?

I stopped following Vista months ago. Nothing interesting (for my case that is) was happening. I probably won't need to move on Vista until SP2, so I could stop looking at this OS.

Actualy looking at the claimed font bitmap in Frutiger-Segoe and the one in this article showed how bad quality images were.

Granted, Segoe does seem like it's pretty much a copy of the one mentioned in the post above mine.

Preety much a copy? Did you actualy read the PDF that was linked in article parent provided. A LOT OF CHARACTERS ARE EXACT COPY. And this claim won that case.

[From the article]
"As rightfully observed by the Applicant and uncontested by the Holder, the prior design and the RCD are to be considered identical. The typefaces of both designs have the same stroke thickness. The ratio from cap-height to descender height is equal. The proportion of character height to character pitch is identical. The type face in the specimen text does not show any differences. The minuscule “a”, “c”, “e” “g” and “t” have the same proportion in the prior design and the RCD. The height of the crossbeam at the “e” is identical. The height of the bow at the “a” is identical. The “c” shows the same shape and the same loophole. The lowercase “s” and the capital “S” show the same sweep. The capital “G” and “S” are totally identical in both designs. The numeric characters “3”, “5”, “6” and “9” do not show any difference."

This could almost only be possible with actual copy/paste.

c..c..c.. and you're accusing my post being blatant? How about yours then?

btw. I missed the font, but I still got the fact this is a rip-off. Why would my post be blatant:?

Edited 2006-06-05 20:07

Preety much a copy? Did you actualy read the PDF that was linked in article parent provided. A LOT OF CHARACTERS ARE EXACT COPY. And this claim won that case.

Um.. that doesn't contradict what I said at all. Pretty much a copy, as in it's pretty much a copy but not 100%. 95% or more maybe? I don't know, I'm not going to narrow it down that much. Sheesh man, chill.

> Nice fonts. I'm also surpised that Microsoft is publishing them under a nice licence.

Do you mean the following paragraph?
"License
This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License"

That applies to the blog entry, not to the fonts!

That applies to the blog entry, not to the fonts!

Doh ! You're right !

I was _so_ impressed by the fonts that I lost the meaning of what I was reading :-)

It sound too strange anyway that microsoft released something under the CC !

I'm guessing this is a troll, because you can't possibly be serious.

Aside from the fact that there are thousands of people working on different Vista things in paralell, Microsoft didn't make these. They paid a company that specializes in fonts to do it.

What's so hard to understand?

Then they need to take one off payroll and put another on payroll. Things arn't getting done and release date is rolling near, they need to get on the ball and fix the current issues.

Let's see when Vista is released:

Heres an OS with a bunch of problems but WAIT it has pretty fonts!!! and look a glass UI!! and see those scalable icons!! Yea use them..

Please.

They should move everyone from their legal department into the Vista development so that they can finish the code faster! And if that doesn't get it done rapidly they can scour the area for transients! And if that doesn't do it, they can start offering the people working at McDonald's $10/h to develop Vista.

You want lawyers to write Vista? You out of your mind?

Your sarcasm meter is off. I suggest a tune up.

Microsoft didn't make these. They paid a company that specializes in fonts to do it.

I am glad they did.

I hope they pay some other company to redo their icons too, and stick to it.

Microsoft paid someone to do their xp icons, but they ended up using using some of their own, which needless to say, were crap.

The teams are independant and have nothing to do with one another. The guys working on fonts aren't the programmers.

Matthew Carter, Microsoft's chief Typographer once said (paraphrasing here) that no typeface is ugly, it's simply how and where it's used that makes it improper.

This is clearly a man who has never seen my first attempt at a sans-serif font using MetaFont

"no typeface is ugly"

Comic Sans MS, anyone?

Woo! You aren't kidding. I just downloaded the Consolas font pack for Visual Studio and its very nice! Always had a probablem telling my curly braces from parens at high resolution in Curior New.

thanks

and here they can download this precious gem

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=22e69ae4-7...

Right. There are only so many ways you can design an "A" and only so many ways you can design a "B" and so on. But if you add them up, the numbers get very large very quickly.

The same goes for writing texts. There are only 26 letters in the (English) alphabet and there are only so many valid words, but if I write a 1000-word piece that just happens to be almost exactly the same as one of your articles (except for a hand-full of words), I'm sure few would honestly think that the similarity was just due to the finite space of valid English texts and coincidence.

Any serious type designer who is capable of creating something like Segoe will be well versed in type history and the development of the different styles of type that exist today. There's simply no way they could have designed Segoe without knowing about Frutiger -- it's such a well-known and classic typeface. Frutiger is one of the first of the humanist san serifs, and it has inspired lots of other typefaces (and also been imitated many times). Obviously, there's a fine line between inspiration and imitation, but there's a difference between using similar design for a hand-full of glyphs or being inspired by the overall look versus making pretty much every glyph the same, except some minor tweaks.

However, at least in the US, typeface designs can't be copyrighted (although you can get a design patent for a typeface). So, creating an identical or very similar typeface as an existing one isn't illegal. It's just that it's frowned upon within the type community.

..are that they're probably under some restrictive MS license. So if people use them on webpages and documents they wont look good on other operating systems.

The msttcorefonts don't have a restrictive license at all, so I'm wondering where you get the above idea from. MS's webfonts package (Arial, Trebuchet MS, etc) have a very simple license (they need to include a license when distributed) and that's it.

http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/faq8.htm
http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/eula.htm

Didn't you read the sites you linked to? The problems with the corefonts are that:

1. Distributions can't ship them. People have to find and download them themselves.
2. The exes can't be changed in any way. So people will have to extract, convert and install them themselves.

and all the lower case letters would be patented.
Several organizations would come forward claiming to have prior art showing that lower case letters were not a MS invention, but MS lawyers would counter by claiming that since no one had tried making a profit off of them before, they were fair game.

Ok. Enough with the MS bashing, now...

Edited 2006-06-06 06:46

check out WEFT-3 by MS.. It does just that

Web pages (can) use font lists - the list is tried from left to right until a font that the user has is located, so you can degrade gracefully if you dont have hot-new-fonts.