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)."

Re:Market Hold Consolidation?

Well I'm still using a CGA adapter. Does the world need more than 4 colors?

Re:Factor

That's true. 6.4 colors should indeed be enough for anybody!

Re:Market Hold Consolidation?

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.

Re:Market Hold Consolidation?

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.

Re:Market Hold Consolidation?

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.

Re:Market Hold Consolidation?

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.

Re:Market Hold Consolidation?

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.

Haha

I saw the words "standard" and "Vista" in the same sentence and had to laugh! :-)

Re:Nice

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'.

Re:Nice

I'd like to see an example of them without antialiasing.

I wouldn't, if I were you -- might damage your eyes permanently. But if you insist...

Consolas with no antialiasing [wikimedia.org]

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 [wikimedia.org]), and "Aah! My eyes! The googles, they do nothing!" with no antiaiasing.

Re:Nice

Say what you will about Microsoft but these fonts looks better than anything on Linux and Mac.

Don't most GNU/Linux users surf with Lynx anyway?

Re:Nice

Say what you will about Microsoft but these fonts looks better than anything on Linux and Mac.

Don't most GNU/Linux users surf with Lynx anyway?

Only the kids, I think most of us just telnet to port 80.

Damn kids, can't even whistle a carrier anymore, how are they going to check their email on the road ?

Re:Nice

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.

Re:Nice

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':

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/03/download-windows-vista-fonts-legally.html [blogspot.com]

Since the downloads are in .exe format, you will need to use something like Wine or Crossover, if you don't have access to a Windows PC.

Command sequence

1. Download the PowerPointViewer.exe from the link in the article.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=048DC840-14E1-467D-8DCA-19D2A8FD7485&displaylang=en [microsoft.com]
2. Open a DOS window, go to where the PowerPointViewer.exe file is, and create a directory called test.
3. Type the command "PowerPointViewer /extract:complete-path-to-test-folder"
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 [dionysius.com]

They look beautiful on my current monitor, and are a big improvement. All hail the new better standard.

Re:Nice

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.

Yawn

We knew this last year. How is this "news that matters?"

Original author doesn't do CSS as well as you

there's no reason you shouldn't specify {font-family:calibri,arial,sans-serif}

Yes, that's the correct way to do it. Too bad the article leaves the crucial generic font name off the end of the list:

font-family: Constantia, "Palatino Linotype", "Book Antiqua", Palatino;

I see this all the time from Web sites that want to offset something by placing it in a different typeface, so they put font-family: Arial; or so. Then I don't have Arial, the font-family declaration falls through, and it ends up as whatever serif font the rest of my body text is. Not the first time "designers" ignore both W3C recommendations ("Authors are encouraged to offer a generic font family as a last alternative, for improved robustness. [w3.org]") and simple common sense. But hey, all the world's a glossy brochure!

The three Cs...

> 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.'

Furthermore, "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" shall heretofore be referred to as "Collar, Consolidate, and Choke."

Isn't this old news??

I could swear I read about these "new and improved" fonts a few months ago.

Consolas rocks

The Consolas font is a phenomenal mono-spaced font, and I've been using it for a year or more. You can download it [microsoft.com] 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. :)

Re:Consolas rocks

If it's anything like the microsoft fonts used by msttcorefonts you can just treat the exe as a cab file and cabextract it.

I agree that consolas is nice, but wtf is that gross Candara font? It has a faint stench of Comic Sans MS about it.

Re:Consolas rocks

Alternately, you can find a .zip file of all those fonts' TTF files here - http://www.techtoolblog.com/wp-content/uploads/VistFonts/VistaFonts.zip [techtoolblog.com]

"mandatory"?

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.

no, it's not mandatory. what's mandatory is that you understand that what you see, especially with regard to fonts, is not what others see.

if getting these fonts is mandatory, then you better get bitstream vera sans too, because that's what i'm seeing.

Re:"mandatory"?

The logic of the MS argument escapes me completely. When I define on MY page the font in the stylesheet as Arial or whatever, Vista users will see the text as Arial. So WTF are they talking about?

Timeline?

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.)

Free Standard?

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?

Re:Free Standard?

They're totally cross-platform. The setup.exe will run fine in Windows 95, XP, and Vista.

Ummm....

The article...

FYI, this seems to be the article [hunlock.com] in question.

Ummm...

"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?

New fonts useless without ClearType

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.

Re:New fonts useless without ClearType

And Trebuchets are much better at attacking cities than these new "C" fonts.... Oh, wait. Never mind.

Holy Crap... No link to article

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

Consolas 1/l/I; 0/O

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.

"C" fonts: Comic Sans? Nooooooo

Yeah, but we still have to deal with Comic Sans [geofffox.com]...

Why the 'C' fonts don't work (yet) in Web Design

I've ranted about this before [bridgew.edu].

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 [w3schools.com]. 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.

Font size assumptions

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.

Re:Fonts are uncopyrightable

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 [serifmagazine.com]

William

To state it explicitely: There Is No Story

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.

My fonts

I only work with Dingbats

Re:My fonts

I only work with Dingbats

Yeah me too. I can't stand listening to these morons at work.

Constantia damaged?

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?

Ultimate Arrogance...

"Constantia can replace ... Helvetica".

Ah, I think not. Nobody will ever make a film about Constantia - http://www.helveticafilm.com/ [helveticafilm.com]

Maybe one will be made about Comic Sans, but it will be a horror story.

Change For Its Own Sake

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.

TNR wasn't designed to look good on-screen

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.

Actually, Times and Times new Roman are perfectly nice fonts when used as they were intended to be used: as a Newspaper body typeface. They look horrible on screen, certianly; but they was never originally designed to be used on-screen. Fonts which look good in print often look terrible on screen, and vice versa. For example, subtle serifs that look beautiful at 300dpi in a book, or at large sizes on screen, can look awful when rendered at 12pt on a 96dpi screen.