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)."

Haha

[reset_button]

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

Re:

[PhrostyMcByte]

Microsoft has never referred to these as new core web fonts. TFA seems to confuse them starting with a "C" as meaning "core". I read an article directly from Microsoft (which I fail to locate at the moment) that said they start with a "C" because they were all designed specifically to take advantage of ClearType, but there were also three market-drone "C" words that were stressed. None of them were "core".

Re:

[h2g2bob]

Standard fonts [w3.org]:

• serif
• sans-serif
• cursive
• fantasy
• monospace

Yawn

[BladeMelbourne]

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

The three Cs...

[Tackhead]

> 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."

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.

Re:

[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:

[stranger_to_himself]

Consolas does look nice, and quite a lot like Computer Modern Typewriter. Calibri is also very nice, and to my untrained eye at least seems extremely close to Computer Modern Sans.

The spacing of Cambria looks odd. Not sure if that's the font's fault though.

Re:

[daeg]

Not all of the fonts are intended for all purposes. We use Cambria on some printed materials and it looks nice. Constantia is great printed, too.

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:

[urbanriot]

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

Re:

[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.

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. :)

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:

[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:

[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.

Re:

[DragonWriter]

Viewing the entire web in comic sans is bound to have some effect on your mental health...

Probably not one distinguishable from just "viewing the entire web" to start with.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[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."

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.

"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.

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?

Vista's new 'Standard' web fonts

[Amnenth]

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

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.

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.)

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?

Re:Free Standard?

[spud603]

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

Ummm....

[Otter]

The article...

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

Re:

[timbck2]

I was wondering where the article link was. Thanks!

(Someone please mod this +1 Informative!)

Re:

[PinkPanther]

From the article:

Filed: Sat, Apr 14 2007 under Programming|| Tags: css1 webdesign fonts

Now that's what I call bleeding edge news for nerds .

Tags: old, stale, !news, ~nothing, sigh

Why?

[QuietLagoon]

Why would web designers want to use fonts that require the use of Windows Vista to render? Isn't it bad enough that web designers have to work around all the bugs in IE?

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.

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?

New fonts useless without ClearType

[A Friendly Troll]

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

[nojomofo]

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

Innovation

[David Off]

Glad to see Microsoft has not lost its hunger to innovate.

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

They forgot a few

[192939495969798999]

Crapola
who-Cares-ia
Compatiblity-break-a-you-face-firefox-a

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:

[nuzak]

> here's my take on Consolas's 1/l/I differentiation. Essentially, it's Courier New.

They look different when you're not using a screenreader or braille term, which you obviously are.

Or maybe you mean Lucida. The new fonts are basically less heavy versions of the ones in the middle column, because cleartype made the old fonts appear too black.

Re:

[nuzak]

GP: sorry about the snark, you were talking about the comparison of 1/l/I -- yeah, Consolas was designed to be a "programmer font". I imported it into Linux, but I end up having to use other fonts in emacs, since Consolas doesn't look so hot without AA (emacs on win32 does do AA though, big win there!)

Re:

[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).

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 s

Arial, Helvetica, Verdana

[unity100]

We developers wont be fooled into being forced into vista just for 3-4 fonts. You could have done this 'update' to Xp's too, just like you "updated" xp's core files without telling anyone.

"C" fonts: Comic Sans? Nooooooo

[chemguru]

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

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

[_bug_]

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

[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.

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: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

New fonts are unnecessary

[jayayeem]

If you ask me, all fonts besides Courier New and Arial are superfluous. I guess you could also have a proportional serif font, but I wouldn't use it.

Maybe that's why I'm not a web designer.

pfft...

[djupedal]

How many more MS supposed news 'snippets' are coming between now & the release of Leopard?

Can we just get it over with, and pre-tag them all 'noise', since all these are intended to do is dilute Apple's newest OS release?

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.

My fonts

[alfredo]

I only work with Dingbats

Re:My fonts

[j.sanchez1]

I only work with Dingbats

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

Constantia damaged?

[Trillan]

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...

[Bazman]

"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

[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:Market Hold Consolidation?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, you have no idea on what you're missing out.

I've got SIXTEEN colors on my screen! EGA power!

Now, the question is, will we ever need more than 16 colors? Yes, I've heard about a 256-colors standard coming up in a few months, but that's just ridiculous...

Re:

[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]

Re:Factor

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:

[rbanffy]

I have an Apple II. Can you move something half a pixel to the left?

Re:

[PhxBlue]

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

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

Re:Market Hold Consolidation?

[SpeedyDX]

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:

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Market Hold Consolidation?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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:

[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).

Re:

[mstahl]

the Microsoft Typography people are pretty good

Even this guy [achewood.com]?

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.

Re:

[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.

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: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: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'.

Re:

[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 m

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

[Frosty Piss]

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

[Fred_A]

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

[p0tat03]

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:

[notthe9]

How do you get to cons?

Re:

[Bluesman]

You mean without a car? first.

Re:

[MacTO]

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

Alas, the last time I tried whistling at 2.4 GHz, the FCC came knocking on my door and told me to stop.

Re:

[Midnight Thunder]

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

If these fonts are freely distributable, then anyone with a Mac or Linux, will be able to use them. Also 'looks better' is very subjective and also depends what you are doing.

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:

[Random Web Developer]

"""This page explains how to get hold of them 'legally':"""

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

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:

[nuzak]

I don't believe they are freely distributable. The only one Microsoft even let escape from Vista is Consolas, and even that requires that you have a Visual Studio product in order to install (but VS Express qualifies. Seems a silly hoop to jump through, don't it?)

These fonts seem to exist because font smoothing increased their apparent blackness too much, so they dialed it down a little (or in the case of Corbel, a lot -- Verdana is way too black in comparison).

Consolas is quite a nice font though.

Re:

[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.

Re:

[PhrostyMcByte]

They are phenomenal fonts, but there's only one problem - CSS's font fallback support is almost useless. Fonts of the same point size being different in actual size is quite common, and these ClearType fonts tend to be significantly smaller than other fonts. There is currently no way to specify sizes for individual fallback fonts, and there is no good way to test for font availability in Javascript.

So unless you are developing a site specifically for users who have this font installed, be prepared to ba

Re:

[Bogtha]

They are phenomenal fonts, but there's only one problem - CSS's font fallback support is almost useless.

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:

[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

[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.

Re:

[DAldredge]

Vista's client share is already greater than that of Linux, at least on the desktop.

Re:

[bigstrat2003]

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.

Re:

[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 "bro

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:

[XanC]

My understanding (and this Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] seems to back it up) is that they tried to put that genie back in the bottle. And the article says that even now they can't be used to "add value" to a commercial product.

So it looks to me like they're trying to create a new set of must-have fonts that they won't allow people to use on Linux.

Re:

[Fred_A]

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.

But at least ComicSans has its uses.
For example you can use it to spot who has absolutely no business composing text on a computer.

I've used ComicSans (well indirectly) quite a lot in my never ending quest to clean up office document crud in the places I've been (Yes I'm a nazi, I don't mind).

I need a "Use ComicSans and die" tshirt.

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:

[pclminion]

Heh. I Freudian-slipped there with "piece" vs. "peace." May you rest in pieces!

Re:

[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 c