Beginning in 2006, Microsoft says it will ship with its operating system and other software products six brand new typefaces created especially for extended on-screen reading.
The Next Big Thing in Online Type
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I like the new fonts. clear fonts should be a high priority for any OS!
Whatever one thinks of Microsoft, this is an excellent initiative. Looking at the images in the article, these are really nice, high-quality fonts designed by professional typographers. I hope Microsoft release their accompanying booklet “Now Read This” on their website. I would be very interested to read what the typographers have to say about the design of their fonts.
“Consolas” seems absolutely not usable (at least in programming environment). I’ve nothing against its smoothness (even on CRT it’s looking good), but variable character height and some problem with baseline alignment makes code rows look bouncing (? – sorry I couldn’t find precise term here).
About on-screen reading – maybe I’m getting a bit old, but I always prefer printed text over screened one.
But generally this is “innovation” from Microsft (innovation for Windows of course). Maybe these new fonts avoid me changing default fonts from current ones (Arial + Times New Roman + Courier) in every other Microsoft program.
These new fonts are definitely the Longhorn feature I’m most excited about. Microsoft’s typography department has its act together, and I’m excited to see what the’ve come up with. It doesn’t hurt that they hired some heavyweight typographers to design the fonts
Most of those typefaces don’t look that different from one another IMHO. Also, the article says that the samples were scanned from a book– so who know what they’ll really look like on screen. I think the Bitstream Vera family is the most readable set of typefaces I’ve yet seen.
If anybody reading the font descriptions are curious about the terminology, I would recommend reading Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style. It’s an absolutely wonderful introduction to typography, and an absolutely beautiful book in and of itself. It’s cool to be able to put these new fonts into their proper historical context, and get an idea of what is really out there in the world of fonts.
> I think the Bitstream Vera family is
>the most readable set of typefaces I’ve yet seen.
Problem is, the default Vera fonts don’t support all languages. Which is the reason Red Hat doesn’t use them as defaults. Additionally, Vera fonts are close to Verdana, and this kind of typeface can not be a generic solution for all cases. This is why these MS typefaces are pretty cool.
I think these fonts are nice, and am glad for PC users that Microsoft has built them in.
Years and years of Arial and horrific Windows default fonts really made the product look shoddy. Given MS’s culture, it is not surprising to me that it took this long for them to figure it out, but it is good they finally did and have some nice looking fonts.
The one funny thing in the article is the ‘fonts being in the gates top 5.’ Nice marketing, but there is no way the uber nerd figured this out. Paladium, search, a new UI to make people feel they are using some old, now that is a list I would believe.
I’m a sucker for typesetting and calligraphy. I have been known to buy books just because they have high-quality illustrations, typesetting and calligraphy. For the longest time, I wouldn’t use any typesetting program other than LaTeX, but I digress.
Adobe also has some high-quality fonts. Unfortunately, they cost money. I wonder how easy it will be to get those fonts on Linux. Anyway, in my opinion, Calibri and Corbel won the show. Good stuff from Microsoft, even though I know they are going to hoard it.
Microsoft knows fonts
I absolutely fell inlove with Calibri and Consolas. Very nice. Candara also doesn’t look as bad as the author wrote. It looks OK when in uppercase.
Most of those typefaces don’t look that different from one another IMHO
You are probably one of those that doesn’t see the difference between Arial and Helvetica right?
Windows default fonts are not really all that bad, but not great at all. The worst I’ve seen are default KDE fonts. I’m surprised there wasn’t much controversy on that subject. After all, fonts are not something to joke with
I don’t know about the rest of you, but anti-aliased fonts look out of focus to me, so I find them much harder to read since my eyes are constantly trying to focus on the text. The Consolas font is the worst offender in that bunch in this regard…
Corbel is my favourite!
Goodness! Enough of the “warm”, “friendly”, “assertive”, and (blech) “cuddly” fonts already!
They are lowly fonts! Stop anthropomorphizing them. They hate it when you do that.
(They are rather attractive fonts, by the way).
For the longest time, I wouldn’t use any typesetting program other than LaTeX, but I digress.
Heh. I’ve gotten to the point where I refuse to use anything but pdftex to write documents. I’m going to spend days writing a document, and then let MS Word turn it into raggedy-edged crap? I think not!
I’m sorry, I’m not a typographist or whatever. I’m just a plain user. And as a user my opinion is: WTF?!?
What’s the big deal about these fonts? IMO they look like normal fonts. Nothing special about them.
I don’t see these fonts “improving readability”. I can read text in Arial, Times New Roman, etc. either on screen or printed just fine.
Most of those typefaces don’t look that different from one another IMHO.
They aren’t supposed to look too different.
There was a conscious decision by the project planners that four of the six faces would have the same x-height so that they could be used together in the same line of text with ease. My Constantia type has a smaller x-height and longer extenders (hence, more ‘bookish’), and Luc’s Consolas monospaced font has a larger x-height; the others are all the same. Remember that the huge majority of people using these fonts will not be typographers, but MS Word users. So we can’t expect them to be sophisticated enough to figure out how to visually harmonise different typefaces through relative scaling, so the goal was to simplify this for them by making fonts that are at least reasonably harmonised. For the same reason, the fonts have coordinated vertical metrics, so that the linespacing remains constant whichever of the fonts you employ. Yes, this is at the expense of variety, but variety was not the goal.
(John Hudson, from http://www.typophile.com/forums/messages/30/67578.html?1111608727 )
If you’d like to see more of these typefaces (including Greek and Cyrillic characters), check them out here: http://www.poynterextra.org/msfonts/index.htm
i think i’ll stick with unaliased arial
i prefer rough edges to a blurry something
That seriousely made my eyes bleed.
im sorry i like small clear fonts, i use 8point verdana all around on my gnome desktop and it absolutely fantastic compared to anything XP has ever ever set up
could be used together in the same line of text with ease.
Ewww.
I don’t see much difference between these fonts. There are already a bunch of fonts common to several platforms that people hardly ever use. Other than Times, Helvetica, Verdana, Georgia and Arial, I don’t see other fonts used on the web.
I hope the new fonts are integrated to the Fonts webcore that has been abandoned for some time.
I guess they do look good on LCDs but they are blurry on my CRT. I will take a look at them with my laptop a bit later…
Corbel is quite great. Consolas sucks, though. Antialias and monospaced fonts usually don’t mix together, especially for programming…
The emperor is nude.
The fonts are quite nice. I just wish they had given them more unique sounding names to make it easier to differentiate them in conversation.
Since these are scans of fonts, they are grayscale. On an actual LCD, they would use sub-pixel rendering, which would make them quite a bit sharper. I also have to say that antialiasing looks just great for monospaced programming fonts. I like anti-aliased (and auto-hinted no less…) Andale Mono 9 quite a bit. It should be noted that Longhorn is designed specifically for high-resolution LCDs and OLEDs. The bluriness of anti-aliasing is much less noticable at higher resolutions. Indeed, it is quite desirable, as one-pixel thick strokes are too narrow to see easily, and two-pixel strokes have too much visual weight.
Considering how much better Windows renders fonts on-screen compared to every other OS out there, I’m really looking forward to fonts designed for screen use only and not print.
Probably. I wonder why Microsoft did not released an actual screenshot with those fonts…
As for anti-aliased fonts for programming, I guess it’s a matter of personal preference. I have a 15.4″ 1400×1050 LCD (around 120DPI, I believe) and while Andale Mono/Bitstream Vera Mono does look good, I prefer a font with an high contrast like Terminus. That said, I never liked Freetype…
Cool, perhaps the Linux distros will start coming out with decent default fonts.
The people on here who don’t understand how important fonts are to useability are probably the same people who have websites with lime, pink or baby blue fonts on white backgrounds, java snow during Christmas and the annoying follow-the-cursor gimmicky junk. Probably coders.
Fonts are one of those subtle things that can make or break a visual experience. A font can make a publication/ web page easy to read or not read at all. Line spacing, kerning, etc. are all subtle changes that are pretty critical. It’s why one resume makes it through and another is thrown in the trash.
That’s also why you should never do a resume in Word
More importantly, there is the question of readability, which is also a subtle thing. The Microsoft typography guys make an excellent point. If the new rendering technology makes text even 5% more readable, that’s three minutes saved every hour. For a lot of people, that easily adds up to a nice coffee break at the end of the day. That’s just a first-order effect. The second-order effects are more important. The impact of eliminating tiny, yet constant, annoyances can be incredible. Try replacing that old lamp in your office with a bright, white light. You’ll just plain feel better at the end of the day. For those who read a lot on their computer, good fonts can have the same impact.
Considering how much better Windows renders fonts on-screen compared to every other OS out there, I’m really looking forward to fonts designed for screen use only and not print.
Not for me it doesn’t, ClearType is nasty on my CRTs, both at home on my Gateway and work on my ADI. They give me a headache because I can see the hideous blues and browns Microsoft have chosen for their “blending” colours. This is insane when the font is black on white, it’s similarly nausiating to looking at jpegs which have been over-sharpened.
Fonts on OSX are good, BeOS was good, RiscOS was also good (and must have been one of the first OS’s to render the whole desktop anti-aliased, in the early 90’s) and KDE/Gnome have improved dramatically.
Non-cleartype fonts suck for two reasons, firstly they’re always kerned awkwardly, secondly they scale terribly.
So, I applaud Microsoft for doing something positive in this area, and I look forward to using these new fonts on KDE/Gnome, where they’ll be rendered correctly…lol 😀
Part of the reason that Microsoft is creating these new fonts is so that they can lock more people into their next OS. The fonts will only be available with a license from Microsoft. This makes it more difficult for people to switch away as it makes their Word documents look different anywhere that the fonts aren’t licensed. More than likely they’ll make one of these the default font for all new documents created by their products (Office and web creation tools).
Michael
I too, like the result of Latex but all the editors is so much worse to write in compared to MS Word. Except for Word, I haven’t seen a good Swedish spell checker.
Oh, and I really look forward to these fonts
[quote]Considering how much better Windows renders fonts on-screen compared to every other OS out there,[/quote]
Really?????????? they all seem about the same to me
Mr Contraire, I don’t think you understand how ClearType works … you mentioned CRTs … they are actually only meant for LCDs since it is based on doing sub-pixel anti-aliasing. LCDs use three strips of side-by-side colour to represent the pixel, unlike CRTs that are basically a circular/triangular grouping of pixels. So MS didn’t choose the colours you see in the ‘blending’ but instead they are the subpixels (the R/B) of a pixel itself.
You’re forgetting about the last step of Cleartype. After using those subpixels, you’re supposed to run a filter to eliminate those fringing artifacts. In my experience, the filter used in Xft results in “blacker” text than the one used in Cleartype.
Try running the ClearType tweaker so you can get them looking better on your screen. It does wonders.
Cleartype is simply the best font rendering technology out right now.
but only if the operator of a website has licensed them for embedding or if an individual user has licensed them for personal use.
Hm, these fonts are crafted well, but i don’t get the point what’s so special about them.
Examples at smaller sizes would be necessary. Nobody reads documents using fonts this large, besides they’re scanned from a printed page – i can’t comment on the appearance on screen (the rendering) – and that’s what is really important.
btw, at large sizes the current font-smoothing technology is good, it fails at small sizes. For small type, I’m also one of the folks who prefer crisp bitmapped fonts over aa’ed type. Readability is better for me.
my ranking in rendering quality, highly subjective of course.
1 – Windoze / Freetype2 (used in gnome, etc)
Points for Win/Gnome for offering user-control over rendering engine
2 – Beos (because the desktop-fonts were quite crisp AND smooth)
3 – Os-X … too blurry at times for my taste. no hard hinting! using bitmap-fonts is nearly impossible and poorly supported on the desktop. Disable smoothing on X and watch for yourself.
4 – Riscos … i just got one screenshot, it showed horrible blurry rendering, does anyone know something about the current technology in risc-os ?
and now mod me down if you like….
I’m a sucker for typesetting and calligraphy. I have been known to buy books just because they have high-quality illustrations, typesetting and calligraphy. For the longest time, I wouldn’t use any typesetting program other than LaTeX, but I digress.
Then you know that LaTex is not the be all end all solution for typesetting, and in fact most professional typesetters DO NOT use it, except in the fields of science (Mathematical books etc). The books you like very probably weren’t made with LaTeX (or TeX).
Fonts are one of those subtle things that can make or break a visual experience
Funny. These onese make my eyes hurt.
For a lot of people, that easily adds up to a nice coffee break at the end of the day.
Yeah, and computers were supposed to make us work less and have more free time.
These are supposed to be good? For what? Artwork? Not for on-screen readability. Any font that uses the same glyph for ‘I’ and ‘l’ can’t expect to be taken too seriously.
I agree with another comment that the names are way too similar…they all blur together in my memory.
I hate the “g” descenders that drop down on the left side. Who writes like that?
Calibri: I and l are the same. Zero and ‘Oh’ are nearly the same. Numbers are variable width and drop below the baseline.
Cambria: I and J barely distinguishable.
Candara: Letters are easy to distinguish, but who uses fixed-width fonts? (I always do in emacs, but the masses of people probably don’t.)
Constantina: See Cambria
Corbel: I and J are better.
Part of the reason that Microsoft is creating these new fonts is so that they can lock more people into their next OS. The fonts will only be available with a license from Microsoft. This makes it more difficult for people to switch away as it makes their Word documents look different anywhere that the fonts aren’t licensed. More than likely they’ll make one of these the default font for all new documents created by their products (Office and web creation tools).
Michael
Bingo! That’s the first thing I was thinking when I read this article.
You can tune your fonts, click here:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/cleartype/tuner/1.htm
It’s probably activex so you unfortunatelly use IE.
DonQ Wrote: “About on-screen reading – maybe I’m getting a bit old, but I always prefer printed text over screened one.”
Being fifteen years old, I want to say that I don’t think age makes a difference here. Books are just more friendly. When I’m feeling sick/tired reading from a computer screen is painful, but reading a book is very pleasant (depending on the literature).
You also don’t strain your eyes reading a book :/