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.
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.
My vote (Score:3, Funny)
My vote is for Fonty McFontFace. It's a great sans serif font.
Re:My vote (Score:5, Funny)
Comic sans
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Everyone I know that uses MS Word seems to change it to that anyway, so its a no brainer.
Re: My vote (Score:2)
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Mojibake
Re: My vote (Score:2)
As long as the font isn't one of the recent fad of fuzzy fonts that so many web sites uses. I have had to block font downloading with uBlock to make pages readable.
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You know it will be.
Bierstadt (Score:2)
Bierstadt, translated to english literally means "Beer City" :)
Good name for a default font
Re:Bierstadt (Score:5, Informative)
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(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.
Tenorite, Bierstadt, Skeena, Seaford, & Grandv (Score:4, Funny)
Sounds like a prestigious morgue, or an ambulance chasing law firm.
Re:Tenorite, Bierstadt, Skeena, Seaford, & Gra (Score:5, Funny)
If your eyes have been injured by squinting at the default fonts in your word processor, you need a powerful attorney.
Remeber: Your OS vendor is not on your side. Get the representation you deserve: Tenorite, Bierstadt, Skeena, Seaford, & Grandview.
We will get you compensation, or we don't get payed.
Call to action! (Score:2)
Re: Call to action! (Score:4, Informative)
You can actually disable that.
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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.
Re: Call to action! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Er, they do notice and care. And proper quotes are actually identifiable as quotes (start and end quotes to boot) in advanced searches.
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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.
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... 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!
There's only one possible choice. (Score:5)
Confusing characters (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
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!)
I'll vote for different characters (Score:5, Insightful)
That is one reason that I user Verdana everywhere, especially for code editing. It is also easier to read. One thing Microsoft got right. The I has bars on it.
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Have you tried Input Mono? https://input.djr.com/download... [djr.com]
You can customise the font before download to put bars on the letters that you want etc.
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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.
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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.
Atkinson Hyperlegible (Score:5, Informative)
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)
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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.
Re: OH GOOD! (Score:3)
Just do a ctrl+a and pick Arial.
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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...
Re: (Score:2)
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]).
Font shapes can't be trademarked.... (Score:2)
We have only five to choose from? (Score:2)
I guess Microsoft's controlling the choices to avoid another "Boaty McBoatFace" fiasco. Shucks...and I was hoping to vote for Comic Sans.
New Courier New (Score:3)
Re:New Courier New (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: New Courier New (Score:2)
ESSELTUB is also a nice font. But some people might prefer LÃderbÃg.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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].
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Nice, thanks for mentioning these. Downloaded and installed.
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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).
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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)
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Compared to EB Garamond or Gentium, Liberation Serif is the pits.
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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.
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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)
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.
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...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?"
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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?
I set default on my word processors to what I want (Score:2)
Let's go old skool... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Let's go old skool... (Score:3)
+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.
Time To Screw Over Libre Office Users (Score:2)
Little square boxes anyone?
too many fonts (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
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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.
Re: too many fonts (Score:2)
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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
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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
Re: (Score:2)
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)
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.
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Literally nobody but yourself cares.
That's nice. And by nice I mean you have a rude, off-putting attitude. The point of listing what I do, which I think is not all that unusual for us common folk that use fonts, is I'm not making logos or advertisements. That my purposes are not all that decorative. And I'm not a professional typesetter preparing copy.
D: None of the above (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: D: None of the above (Score:5, Informative)
Well, Arial is Helvetica. Just that Microsoft didn't want to pay the license.
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Arial is the bastard son of Helvetica, and is only popular because Microsoft shipped it and pushed it and gushed endlessly about how wonderful it was.
It's okay, but only because it's a carbon-copy of Helvetica.
I'll vote against Helvetica (Score:2)
'cause some of the letters have the same shape. How could anyone thing that that was a good idea!
Re: D: None of the above (Score:5, Interesting)
Arial isn't Helvetica. It has the same character widths and line height so that documents can be converted between the two without affecting formatting, and the character shapes are influenced by Helvetica but are not the same.
Arial was also designed to render better on low DPI screens. A lot of effort went into hinting to make that work right.
Comparison here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
You can see that Arial is a bit more fancy. Not serif but Helvetica uses more straight lines with ends at 90 degrees rather than the odd angles Arial uses. Letter shapes are also more consistent in Helvetica, e.g. compare the capital J and R with Arial that looks slightly squashed and slightly stretched respectively.
Heh, cute suggestions, guys... (Score:5, Funny)
Comic Sans, Courier New, haha, oh you guys crack me up! :-)
But let's kick it up a notch:
Papyrus
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Comic Sans, Courier New, haha, oh you guys crack me up! :-)
But let's kick it up a notch:
Papyrus
You know it's true ... because Papyrus ... [pinterest.com]
vi is my shepherd (Score:5, Funny)
I shall not font.
Zaph Dingbats (Score:2)
The winner is... Fonty McFontface! (Score:2)
That's an option, right??
Never Satisfied. (Score:5, Informative)
"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.
If they're doing it for licensing (Score:2)
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 (Score:2)
Title (Score:2)
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.
Change for changes sake (Score:2)
Nuff said
But (Score:4, Interesting)
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...
Re: (Score:2)
* It's beyond euro-centric to claim the alphabet for English...
Re: (Score:2)
Chinese typically uses the English alphabet for inputting (pinyin) and pronunciation.
Re: But (Score:2)
Re: But (Score:2)
Cool story bro, post something here in those languages and we'll talk about it.
Who can tell the difference? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
His Karma is bad, so he starts at -1. You can always click on the (Score: X) if you are curious about the moderation.
Do not want. At all. (Score:5, Insightful)
Notes:
Fonts need to be installable on various platforms and must not require a network connection to be displayed.
Ploy to foce purchase Re:Do not want. At all. (Score:2)
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.
Anything but Carter (Score:2)
Matthew Carter is a blight on typography.
The wisdom of all fonts. (Score:2)
They are looking for people who have the wisdom of all fonts.
Comic Sans (Score:2)
Can we pull a Boaty-McBoatface with this?
I'll miss Calibri (Score:2)
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).
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Not one single 640 font joke? (Score:2)
The quality of the comments is sliding.
Default (Score:2)
Isn't there one where the letters, if you look closely enough, are little nude ladies?
Artists should design fonts (Score:2)
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?
Why sans serif?! (Score:2)
Ungh. Why sans serif?
http://www.ca7.uscourts.gov/fo [uscourts.gov]
Re: (Score:2)
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.
One word (Score:2)
WingDings.
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wow cool story! guess what?? i use microsoft everything and my life is just as good as yours is! yay!!
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