"Free... is just another word for nothing..."
Janis Joplin

ChrisL

This article is silly. If the FOSS universe gets any nice new system fonts it will probably be in the same way MS Office does, by commission. There's no reason Novell, Sun or Google can't pay for fonts if the need arises. I think it's happened in the past. The oldest open-source myth is that the people who create it aren't getting paid.

I predict that for 99.99% of consumers, the new fonts have no effect on whether or not they chose to use Microsoft Office.

This is true, all of the successful "free fonts" in this space were paid for by somebody, such as The Society for Biblical Literature, Microsoft, SIL or GNOME.

There is no such thing as a free lunch. You can get an appetizer free sometimes, but only if you come in and pay for the lunch :-)

ChrisL

About 6 years ago there was one lass at college who assumed everything you typed had to be done in Times New Roman as if it was an unwritten rule... I'm not sure why she thought this (maybe because it was the default choice in Microsoft Word) or why she joined the course, but she did leave a few weeks later. Perhaps she had a breakdown over the idea of using other fonts!

Still, at least Microsoft are "experimenting" with another option as the default font. It'll probably involve lots of costly upgrades to the consumer, though. You know, will only work with XP Pro edition 2012 or something silly!

Well this is going off-topic a bit, but the switch to Calibri isn't exactly an experiment. Of course Office 2007 hasn't shipped yet but the new default is still there in the latest beta, so unless someone has a serious change of heart we'll be seeing a lot more of that font in the future. Although the font will work 'down-level' it's definitely been designed for the latest rendering technology. There's plenty of information here and on the blogs if your interested - search on "Calibri"

I wish they'd let you set your own default font and be done with it. Same with Adobe apps, I wish Illustrator didn't always default to Myriad.

From Word 2003 help - i typed "how do i change default font"

Set the default font

If your document already contains text formatted with the properties you want to use, select that text.

On the Format menu, click Font.

Select the options you want to apply to the default (default: A predefined setting. You can accept the default option settings, or you can change them to suit your own preferences.) font. If you selected text in step 1, the properties you want will appear in the dialog box.

Click Default.

Any new document you open will use the font settings you selected.

Note The default font applies to new documents based on the active template (template: A file or files that contain the structure and tools for shaping such elements as the style and page layout of finished files. For example, Word templates can shape a single document, and FrontPage templates can shape an entire Web site.). Different templates might use different default font settings.

>I wish Illustrator didn’t always default to Myriad.

That's an Apple/Adobe co-branding thing - get with the iLife and iLive with iT :-)

To set the default font in Adobe apps, change the font with no documents open.

The number of times I've tried that and lo and behold it soon migrates back to Myriad.

Tim