Standard Web Fonts 'Updated' In Vista 452
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)."
Nice (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Market Hold Consolidation? (Score:5, Interesting)
New fonts useless without ClearType (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Why the 'C' fonts don't work (yet) in Web Design (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Not an improvement (Score:3, Interesting)
Segoe UI, also part of Vista, is also a great UI font in my opinion. We use it on our Intranet and continue to get compliments from the older staff. Arial and the other standard web fonts just aren't that usable for short, concise bits of text you find in user interfaces.
Re:Nice (Score:3, Interesting)
Please point your blame in a different direction. CSS 2.0 had perfectly good support for this [w3.org], but no browser vendors implemented it, so it was taken out of CSS 2.1.
Re:Nice (Score:3, Interesting)
Ok, then click the link to download powerpoint viewer and what do you see?
You may use the fonts that accompany the PowerPoint Viewer only to display and print content from a device running a Microsoft Windows operating system. Additionally, you may do the following:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=048DC840-14E1-467D-8DCA-19D2A8FD7485&displaylang=en [microsoft.com]
I guess it depends on what you define as legal (is a EULA legal for example).
Constantia damaged? (Score:3, Interesting)
So this makes me curious:
Is there a font verification tool in Windows XP SP2?
Does Cambria fail there?
Re:Nice (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Haha (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Market Hold Consolidation? (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (Score:1, Interesting)
Ultimate Arrogance... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Market Hold Consolidation? (Score:1, Interesting)