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Microsoft Software

Microsoft Is Changing the Default Office Font (theverge.com) 150

For the first time in nearly 15 years, Microsoft is changing the default Microsoft Office font -- and it wants your help to pick a new one. The Verge reports: While there are more than 700 font options in Word, Microsoft has commissioned five new custom fonts for Office, in a move away from the Calibri font that has been the default in Microsoft Office for nearly 15 years. The five new sans-serif fonts feature a variety of styles, including traditional, modern, and even one inspired by German road and railway signs. Microsoft is starting to gather feedback on these five new fonts today, and it plans to set one as the new Office default font in 2022.

Microsoft is now releasing these five new fonts in Microsoft 365 so everyone can try them out before a new default is chosen. Polls and feedback will be considered as part of how Microsoft picks a winner, and the company is going to spend the next few months evaluating these new fonts and seeing which ones are proving popular. Once a decision has been made, the new default font will appear in Microsoft Office apps in 2022.

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Microsoft Is Changing the Default Office Font

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  • My vote (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 28, 2021 @07:46PM (#61326116)

    My vote is for Fonty McFontFace. It's a great sans serif font.

  • Bierstadt, translated to english literally means "Beer City"
    Good name for a default font :)

    • Re:Bierstadt (Score:5, Informative)

      by Sique ( 173459 ) on Thursday April 29, 2021 @02:02AM (#61326788) Homepage
      It says in the description that Bierstadt was inspired by mid-20century Swiss typography. And as the the official name of Switzerland is Confederatio Helvetica, you know which class of sans serif fonts it is based on: Helvetica! (And I would bet that the name of the font was chosen to honor Albert Bierstadt [wikipedia.org].)
      • by Whibla ( 210729 )

        (And I would bet that the name of the font was chosen to honor Albert Bierstadt [wikipedia.org].)

        Thanks for that link. I hadn't heard of him before. Although not quite my style, he definitely had a talent: some of his works are very expressive / impressive.

  • by rmdingler ( 1955220 ) on Wednesday April 28, 2021 @07:51PM (#61326130) Journal

    Sounds like a prestigious morgue, or an ambulance chasing law firm.

  • ...end 'Smart quotes' now!
    • Re: Call to action! (Score:4, Informative)

      by Z00L00K ( 682162 ) on Wednesday April 28, 2021 @09:08PM (#61326298) Homepage Journal

      You can actually disable that.

      • I know, but it should be "off" by default.

        Smart quotes are pointless. No one notices them or cares about them. I'd bet that no one has ever remarked at how nice they look or how useful they are, because they're ugly and useless for 99.999% of everything.

        • by MancunianMaskMan ( 701642 ) on Thursday April 29, 2021 @06:08AM (#61327118)

          Smart quotes are pointless. No one notices them or cares about them.

          I notice them when the analyst copy & pastes some sql into an spec document in Word, I copy& paste onward into java or xml code, and then I've got to change the mangled single quotes back to sane ones before anything works.

        • Er, they do notice and care. And proper quotes are actually identifiable as quotes (start and end quotes to boot) in advanced searches.

          • by jbengt ( 874751 )
            If "smart quotes" are so smart, how coming they curl up my marks when I'm typing feet and inches or minutes and seconds?
    • THIS^^^^

      I can't tell you how much time I've wasted doing search and replace to get rid of those shit quotes, but it's way more than I ever wanted to.

    • ... And the stupid habit of actually changing the FORMAT of Hyperlinks as opposed to just showing then. Seriously, if I print a document with a URL in it I do NOT want a blue underline piece of text!

  • by johnnys ( 592333 ) on Wednesday April 28, 2021 @08:01PM (#61326146)
    Comic Sans
  • Confusing characters (Score:5, Informative)

    by figleaf ( 672550 ) on Wednesday April 28, 2021 @08:06PM (#61326154) Homepage

    Looks like same or almost same symbols for different characters.
    For example, Capital i is
    indistinguishable from small L
    &
    italic small L is
    indistinguishable from forward slash.

    • yeah, I'd go with Grandview over Bierstadt - lower case L has a curl and the lower case A looks less like an O (even if that's how I write it with a pen!)

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Which one? There are 5 candidates.

      The Skeena font does have the I/L issue. The others... Where did you find samples? They aren't in TFA, at least not showing I and L for all 5 fonts.

    • Looks like same or almost same symbols for different characters.

      That is a problem with most sans serif fonts. In handwriting, I put serifs on capital I, and exaggerate the "nose" on number 1, to avoid ambiguities when writing down things like electronic device part numbers and mathematical formulae.

      • by John_Sauter ( 595980 ) <John_Sauter@systemeyescomputerstore.com> on Thursday April 29, 2021 @10:59AM (#61327864) Homepage

        If you are concerned about distinguishing I from 1 from L, and 0 from O from Q, try Atkinson Hyperlegible. It is described at this web site: http://helloapplied.com/braill... [helloapplied.com] and downloadable from this one: https://brailleinstitute.org/f... [brailleinstitute.org] .

        Atkinson Hyperlegible is a typeface created in partnership with Braile Institute. It has been developed specifically to increase legibility for readers with low vision, and to improve comprehension.

        Atkinson Hyperlegible font is named after Braille Institute founder, J. Robert Atkinson. What makes it different from traditional typography design is that it focuses on letterform distinction to increase character recognition, ultimately improving readability.

        The Atkinson Hyperlegible font family consists of four fonts, including two weights, in both Roman and oblique. It contains 992 total glyphs, 248 per font. It is based on the traditional grotesque san-serif font style, but departs from that tradition to incorporate unambiguous, distinctive elements in order to increase character recognition and improve readability.

  • OH GOOD! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by joe_frisch ( 1366229 ) on Wednesday April 28, 2021 @08:19PM (#61326168)
    Just what I was hoping for. A new default font that means that if I'm not careful cutting / pasting from old documents it will end up looking slightly off. I hope they are doing this as part of some anti-competitive move to prevent other software from using the same proprietary fonts. I hope its not that they just like making everyone's lives just a tiny bit worse for no reason at all.
    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      I hope its not that they just like making everyone's lives just a tiny bit worse for no reason at all.

      Microsoft? They have at least a very strong faction with exactly this as a life-goal.

    • Just do a ctrl+a and pick Arial.

    • A new default font that means that if I'm not careful cutting / pasting from old documents it will end up looking slightly off.

      Oh god. You're one of those people who don't use destination formatting or styles. *shudders*

      Please tell me you don't manually type in numbered lists as well...

    • I hope they are doing this as part of some anti-competitive move to prevent other software from using the same proprietary fonts. I hope its not that they just like making everyone's lives just a tiny bit worse for no reason at all.

      Actually, it's almost impossible that this is an anti-competitive move.

      Font names can be trademarked, but font shapes cannot be.

      Source: The intro paragraph of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]).

  • I guess Microsoft's controlling the choices to avoid another "Boaty McBoatFace" fiasco. Shucks...and I was hoping to vote for Comic Sans.

  • by jfdavis668 ( 1414919 ) on Wednesday April 28, 2021 @08:20PM (#61326172)
    or maybe Old Times Roman, just for old times sake.
    • Re:New Courier New (Score:4, Interesting)

      by RazorSharp ( 1418697 ) on Wednesday April 28, 2021 @08:26PM (#61326190)

      or maybe Old Times Roman, just for old times sake.

      Yes. A word processor's default should never be a sans serif but they almost always are. Personally, I like Liberation Serif. It's pretty indistinguishable from Times New Roman and comes with LibreOffice on any platform.

      I'm not a huge fan of the Courier suggestion. Monospace fonts have their place (code, screenplays, etc.), but they're not great for most documents because they are inefficient in their use of space and they slow the reader down.

      • ESSELTUB is also a nice font. But some people might prefer LÃderbÃg.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by caseih ( 160668 )

        Liberation Serif is quite a bit different than Times New Roman, however it's designed to have identical widths to the characters of Times New Roman so that documents of a certain era render the same as on Windows. Personally I think Liberation Serif looks better and more modern than Times New Roman, and is very readable.

        My personal favorite, though is what used to be called Linux Libertine. Available at http://libertine-fonts.org/ [libertine-fonts.org].

      • A word processor's default should never be a sans serif but they almost always are.

        Sans fonts are easier to read on a screen with limited resolution (which is most screens).

      • Yes. A word processor's default should never be a sans serif but they almost always are.

        Serif fonts look crap on screen due to low resolution pixels which is why the entire world has switched to using fonts that look crap on paper.

        So it goes...

        (but a paperless world wouldn't be a bad thing)

      • by jabuzz ( 182671 )

        Compared to EB Garamond or Gentium, Liberation Serif is the pits.

      • by jbengt ( 874751 )

        A word processor's default should never be a sans serif but they almost always are.

        I disagree. Your eyes will not always be as young as they are. A serif font makes it hard for me to read, especially if it's small. And even more so if some designer decides to use an 8 point, thin, low contrast font and then decides to use the narrow version.
        Still, I would like the font to clearly differentiate between capital O and zero and among lower case L, capital i, and the numeral 1.

    • or maybe Old Times Roman, just for old times sake

      Times New Roman was a crap choice for a default font. It was designed for narrow newspaper columns, not for letters or other full page width text. The glyphs in Times New Roman are unusually narrow. As a result, many documents end up with lines that are too long for readability (should be 70 chars max), unless you use wide left and right margins, or a bigger point size.

  • No TTFs? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TheNameOfNick ( 7286618 ) on Wednesday April 28, 2021 @08:22PM (#61326182)

    What's the point? The only reason the old Microsoft fonts were acceptable was that everybody had them. Now you need an Office subscription? Not gonna happen. Please change your fonts and send again.

    • ...Please change your fonts and send again.

      I just envisioned the sharing of docs in the future to look something like a Slashdotter finding out about unicode support for the first time.

      "The FUCK did you send me, Bill?"

    • If they want to make it seem they love open source, why not release them under a compatible licence so that they can be used in stock libreoffice installs? Would make sense wouldn't it?

  • by rubberbando ( 784342 ) on Wednesday April 28, 2021 @08:40PM (#61326234)
    ...with some "Times New Roman" or "Arial"...
    • +1 for that. All other fonts are for special cases only.
      I always aim for using Arial as main font.
      A principle is to use sans-serif for texts to be viewed electronically and serif for texts to be printed.

  • Little square boxes anyone?

  • too many fonts (Score:5, Interesting)

    by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Wednesday April 28, 2021 @08:53PM (#61326254) Homepage Journal

    Android has its own fonts (Droid and Roboto and perhaps others). Firefox OS had its own font [wikipedia.org] too. The Go programming language has its fonts too [golang.org]. A let us not forget the hideous Ubuntu Titling [wikipedia.org] font.

    Is the world improved by having more ways to shape your characters? At some point a typeface has to serve either a decorative or a utilitarian purpose. If there is font that is very readable on a modern 250+ DPI display, then we probably don't need 10,000 ways to express the same boring business document.

    That said, I'm probably pissing gasoline on the fire. People have very strong and often emotional opinions about typesetting. I am not a graphic artists and I am not a typesetter. I publish code, blogs, talks, and occasionally technical manuals. It's not that I don't understand why we have typefaces. I just don't see a logical reason for why people think they're a big deal. (and spend literally millions of dollars on them)

    • I sort of agree. I mean I'm not saying we don't need a few different fonts, but honestly I could probably get by just fine with about 20 different fonts rather than the hundreds we have now. I need one regular sans-serif, a serif font for more formal looking documents, courier for when I'm feeling newpapery, and a few decorative fonts like the various scripts and and ole english type fonts. Oh and a good fixed-width font for programming and console use.

      Other than that - its all a waste.

    • The purpose of MS creating new default proprietary fonts is to make documents look bad when you open them in another word processor that doesn't have the font. There's now metrically equivalent fonts to the current defaults commonly available, so they have to update them.
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Often the issue is copyright. There are not many high quality fonts that are licenced in such a way that they can be used by Free and commercial projects without worry.

      It's actually hard work to make a good font. Needs to look good in print and on screen at many different DPIs. For lower DPIs that means extensive hinting, which is itself somewhat dependent on the font rendering engine and even the type of screen (pixel layout/orientation for sub-pixel rendering etc.) It needs to support not just Latin eithe

      • by jabuzz ( 182671 )

        Once you are used to a high DPI screen then all hinting looks shit in my experience. The difference is like between a dot matrix and a laser printer.

        There are however some really high quality fonts available under the SIL Open Font License EB Garamond, Gentium, Andika if you need something for young kids, Source Code Pro for programming are among my favourites. I don't get the trend for sans serif fonts for body text.

        However I do use Consola for my terminals if on a high DPI screen otherwise X11 bitmap font

    • If it makes you feel any better, the younger generation went back to using pictures for words again.

    • What's your problem? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Thursday April 29, 2021 @04:37AM (#61327034)

      Stick to the ones you like. Just like with programming languages professional typographs do this too. I personally welcome the ever growing body of freely licensed high quality fonts. The new choices from MS aren't all that spectacular, but I presume the professionals designing them knew what they where doingand the quality of each is up to standard.

      Anything that makes Linotype and their obscene licensing fees less and less attractive is a good thing IMHO. Point in case: A few years back IBM finally got fed up with paying tens of millions of euros per year (!) for Helvetica and said "Screw this b*llshit, we're making a new universal font for IBM and making it free." They threw some a small fortune at a tag-team of expert typographs (a fraction of the licensing costs) and a few years later gave the world "IBM Plex", a new instant universal classic set of finest quality typefaces. One of the biggest events in recent type history.

      I like it. Keep them fonts coming, I say.

  • D: None of the above (Score:4, Interesting)

    by LeeLynx ( 6219816 ) on Wednesday April 28, 2021 @09:01PM (#61326278)
    Helvetica. [hustwit.com]
  • by CrappySnackPlane ( 7852536 ) on Wednesday April 28, 2021 @09:01PM (#61326282)

    Comic Sans, Courier New, haha, oh you guys crack me up! :-)

    But let's kick it up a notch:

    Papyrus

  • by PPH ( 736903 ) on Wednesday April 28, 2021 @09:03PM (#61326288)

    I shall not font.

  • Just because I like saying the name.
  • That's an option, right??

  • Never Satisfied. (Score:5, Informative)

    by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Wednesday April 28, 2021 @09:29PM (#61326354)

    "While there are more than 700 font options in Word, Microsoft has commissioned five new custom fonts.."

    Sooo, 700 fonts to choose from, and yet none of those are good enough? I mean, you were drunk off your ass when you bought Comic Sans at that Nickelback concert, but none of the other ones?

    Ooh, they're not in fashion anymore. I get it. You need to have...new ones. And none of that middle-earth-class Linux shit. You need custom fonts. Expensive ones too.

    Now that's the kind of ballsy executive decision that comes with a 900-pair shoe collection.

    "700 [fonts] ain't enough for nobody." - Bizarro Bill Gates (a.k.a. BIlly the NeverSaidThatShit Kid)

    TL; DR - I mean, at what point do you get to call yourself a Font Hoarder. Really.

  • Wouldn't Ransom Note be more appropriate?

    And then "which of these five fonts" would just be answered with, "YES."

  • There is only one choice: Wingdings.
  • Ok - a few of those are downright bad. Skeena and Grandview specifically. Seaford is "meh". Tenorite and Bierstadt both look ok. Personally though I still think Calibri is just fine.

  • But (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rossdee ( 243626 ) on Wednesday April 28, 2021 @11:11PM (#61326546)

    The majority of the people of the world don't even use the English alphabet
    (Chinese, Japanese, Cyrillic, Arabic , Farsi, Greek, Hebrew - I'm not sure about Hindi...

  • by The Evil Atheist ( 2484676 ) on Wednesday April 28, 2021 @11:31PM (#61326576)
    Unless you're some graphic designer typography nerd, who's going to really notice? More churn for the sake of it because some designers got bored of an older design.
  • by Barnoid ( 263111 ) on Thursday April 29, 2021 @02:37AM (#61326868)
    This is a terrible idea. From one of the linked document [microsoft.com]:

    Notes:

    • * Cloud fonts are only available to Microsoft 365 subscribers. Documents that have cloud fonts will render correctly in Office 2019.
    • * If you use custom fonts or share documents with users who are using older versions of Office, you'll want to preserve the layout by embedding fonts.

    Fonts need to be installable on various platforms and must not require a network connection to be displayed.

    • Dirty dirty Microsoft. So this is just a ploy to try to force people to buy Office 365 or 2019? Why am I not surprised at all. What's the best way to fight this? What about companies with hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of 2016 office licenses and don't plan on upgrading until 2024? We'll be fighting them every inch of the way, I promise you.

  • Matthew Carter is a blight on typography.

  • They are looking for people who have the wisdom of all fonts.

  • Can we pull a Boaty-McBoatface with this?

  • I hope whatever is picked is still somewhat like Calibri (isofont?). In grad school I had a coauthor with astigmatism who had a very hard time reading Times New Roman, which was my "standard" font, so I transitioned to Calibri. The thin parts of the TNR letters disappeared for him. Now I insist on Calibri any time I'm writing. It's clean (hence sans serif), has constant thickness so it's inherently easier to read (to me), and to my eye looks less cluttered than other fonts (except maybe Arial).

  • The quality of the comments is sliding.

  • Isn't there one where the letters, if you look closely enough, are little nude ladies?

  • Not ultra minimalist neat freaks. Boring as fuck. Give me more to my letters. Give me some bars on my capital I (i) so it doesn't look like a damn lowercase l (L). Same for a J, needs a top bar. Put a bottom on the 1 to make it more substantial and not blend in with the lowercase l (L) or 7.

    And shit, we have decent resolution now. How about variable thickness on ending trailing low hanging lowercase g, or q. By the way where's the damn backwards curl on the lowercase q damn it?

  • Ungh. Why sans serif?

    Studies have shown that long passages of serif type are easier to read and comprehend than long passages of sans-serif type. The rule accordingly limits the principal sections of submissions to serif type, although sans-serif type may be used in headings and captions. This is the same approach magazines, newspapers, and commercial printers take. Look at a professionally printed brief; you will find sans-serif type confined to captions, if it is used at all.

    http://www.ca7.uscourts.gov/fo [uscourts.gov]

    • by jbengt ( 874751 )
      Maybe studies have shown that, but my eyes beg to differ.
      For the same size font, sans serif is much easier on my eyes.
      Still, I'd like the fonts to differentiate O and 0 and l, I, and 1.
  • WingDings.

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