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)."

Yawn

[BladeMelbourne]

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

Isn't this old news??

[neo-mkrey]

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

Consolas rocks

[mbadolato]

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. :)

Timeline?

[stonecypher]

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.)

Ummm....

[Otter]

The article...

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

Re:Not an improvement

[Frosty Piss]

In Cambria, the horizontal bar of the lowercase letter "e" is a complete blur, as the the bar of "A". Corbel has similar problems.

Not on my monitor.

Re:Consolas rocks

[garbletext]

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:Link missing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here you go:
http://www.hunlock.com/blogs/Downloading_and_Using_Vista_Web_Fonts [hunlock.com]

Re:Not an improvement

[urbanriot]

The issue you speak of does not occur on my monitor either. Perhaps you have a PDF rendering issue?

Consolas 1/l/I; 0/O

[_xeno_]

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.

Re:Nice

[Midnight Thunder]

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.

Re:Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't most Linux and Mac users snag the default windows fonts anyway?

Fonts are uncopyrightable

[TrumpetPower!]

Feel free to pass these and other fonts around as you wish, entirely guilt-free.

Federal Register, Vol. 53, No 189 [nyud.net] (coralized 4 Mbyte PDF)

Cheers,

b&

Re:Nice

[Traxxas]

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

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Consolas rocks

[Anonymous Coward]

just tried cabextract on setup.exe, and it complains "no valid cabinets found". It works fine with the Ms TT core fonts.

Re:Fonts are uncopyrightable

[WillAdams]

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

Re:Not an improvement

[Ecuador]

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.

Re:Nice

[SEMW]

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

[Traxxas]

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.

Re:Nice

[PhxBlue]

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.

They're freely available as part of both Vista and Office 2007. I'd give it about a year until they've met your criteria.

Re:Consolas rocks

[ortholattice]

You can download it from MS for free but it's an exe file.

Unfortunately, it's not quite free. First you have to purchase Visual Studio 2005. I ran the setup.exe, and just before it finished installing (it completed two sets of progress bars without complaint) it said, "Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 must be installed prior to installing this package."

Re:Market Hold Consolidation?

[ozmanjusri]

Are you viewing them on an LCD with ClearType?

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.

Re:Market Hold Consolidation?

[Stewie241]

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 [wikipedia.org]

Original author doesn't do CSS as well as you

[vsync64]

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!

Re:Market Hold Consolidation?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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.

I call shenanigans!

[TigerNut]

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.

Re:Market Hold Consolidation?

[8-bitDesigner]

Technically that's tracking. Leading is the space between lines of text.

Command sequence

[athloi]

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:Market Hold Consolidation?

[PhxBlue]

Four? I'm happy with three: red, green and blue.

(And various combinations thereof, but hey ...)

Re:Market Hold Consolidation?

[shutdown -p now]

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.

Re:Consolas 1/l/I; 0/O

[maxume]

Jeff Atwood, giant ad whore that he is, has a nice article on programming fonts:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000969.html [codinghorror.com]

with screenshots showing the differentiation that you are talking about(as rendered on Vista, with Cleartype enabled).

Re:Market Hold Consolidation?

[iluvcapra]

Why ClearType is broken [damieng.com], 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).

Non European languages

[Noiser]

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...

Re:Consolas rocks

[jabuzz]

Really I have just downloaded the PowerPointViewer.exe program. I then ran that through cabextract and got several files, one of which is called ppviewer.cab. I then ran ppviewer.cab through cabextract and got 23 files ending in .TTF

This was all using Debian Etch.

Buy these fonts from Ascender for $300

[chkn0]

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 [microsoft.com]