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)."

Market Hold Consolidation?

[initialE]

I can only see this as a bid to grab more marketshare in the web client arena. Does the world need more web fonts?

Re:Nice

[Daniel_Staal]

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'.

Not an improvement

[Verteiron]

Looking at the PDF, I see problems with some of the new fonts already. In Cambria, the horizontal bar of the lowercase letter "e" is a complete blur, as the the bar of "A". Corbel has similar problems. These issues are not visible at any zoom level with the fonts the aforementioned are intended to replace.

On the upside, Consolas looks pretty nice.

"mandatory"?

[brunascle]

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.

Vista's new 'Standard' web fonts

[Amnenth]

Or, maybe, Vista could just use the standard fonts that already exist.

Free Standard?

[pembo13]

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?

Ummm...

[julesh]

"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?

Holy Crap... No link to article

[aardwolf64]

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

Re:Market Hold Consolidation?

[Anonymous Coward]

Typography and hardware are two areas where Microsoft truly excels. The one thing they don't do well is producing software.

Yippee?

[Sta7ic]

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.

In what way does it not do so?

[SEMW]

Or, maybe, Vista could just use the standard fonts that already exist.

Ummm...

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.

To state it explicitely: There Is No Story

[SEMW]

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.

Re:Nice

[davmoo]

I have to agree. The one shortcoming that I still see in Linux is that unless you're willing to dick around with the internals, "out of the box" fonts look like crap.

Re:Market Hold Consolidation?

[julesh]

For example, I think Calibiri and Candara are easier to read than Arial and Helvetica, respectively.

The primary difference seems to be that they have larger leading. Compare Arial 10pt with line-spacing:110% with Calibri 11pt, line-spacing: 100% and they look pretty similar, IMO.

TNR wasn't designed to look good on-screen

[SEMW]

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.

Re:Consolas rocks

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like a cheap knock-off of Bitstream Vera Sans Mono to me...

Re:Market Hold Consolidation?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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:Nice

[the_womble]

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.

No, and no.

[SEMW]

because Vista forces users to view the web in only those fonts?

No, it doesn't. It shows whatever font the web designer specifies, and that includes all the usual web standard fonts.

it defaults to them when no explicit font is specified in the web page

No, it doesn't. IE7 in Vista actually still uses Times New Roman as its default font.

Not freely distributable - if you read the license

[cayle clark]

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:

• You may use the software only to view and print files created with Microsoft Office software. You may not use the files for any other purpose.
• You may not: distribute the software with any non-Microsoft software that may use the software to enhance its functionality

The combination of these would seem to absolutely rule out my doing any of:

• Using the fonts for viewing web pages not created with Office
• Copying the fonts from the virtual XP to the real Mac OS X for use there
• Copying the fonts to a virtual Ubuntu system

Since these are all and only what I would have used them for, I declined to accept the terms and deleted the download. Feh.

Font size assumptions

[XanC]

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:missing option

[trolltalk.com]

"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?

Re:"mandatory"?

[smurfsurf]

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?

Change For Its Own Sake

[StormReaver]

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.

Re:Nice

[CastrTroy]

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.

Re:Market Hold Consolidation?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Boy George did say "loving would be easy if your colours were like my dream, red gold and green". Apparently there was something to that CGA palette...

Re:Nice

[CastrTroy]

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.

Re:Nice

[ls -la]

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.

From what I've seen about vista and office 2007 adoption, I doubt it'll get 90% install base without a windows update stealth "critical upgrade" on XP too.

Re:Consolas in Eclipse

[Shados]

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.

Consolas

[panic911]

Ahh Consolas, my new favorite font. It's the best font for development I've seen. I used to be a fan of Courier New but now when I see it I think "ick, thats so 20th century!".

Re:Market Hold Consolidation?

[rs79]

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.