Typophile

Best fonts for Cleartype?

snsh

<font class="dontLookLikeCrap">What do you think are the best fonts to use with Cleartype? I know the canned answer is the Microsoft Reader fonts Berling Antiqua, Lucida Sans Typewriter, and Frutiger Linotype. Berling and Frutiger are okay, except the numerals aren't level height which I can't stand. Lucida Sans doesn't do it for me either- would rather use Courier. So I'd like an alternative for my own desktop.

This Longhorn Frutiger-clone Segoe UI looks good. Don't understand why its TTF files are so large (330k). And I see that this Cleartype Font Collection is 'coming soon', but not that soon.

So what do you recommend as a Cleartype-friendly font? Is there a free font out there that works well? Would it be straightforward for me to alter the existing Berling/Frutiger fontfiles to make the numerals evenly spaced and consistent height? Or should I just wait for Longhorn?</font>

William Berkson

At Typotechnica, Microsoft gave out a pamphlet on the new typefaces that will ship with their new release of Windows. These are especially designed for Cleartype. They are a very impressive collection, including John Hudson's superb Constantia. I haven't seen them on screen, but as they were designed for Cleartype, they promise to be a major improvement.

Si_Daniels

The ClearType team looked at hundreds of fonts when picking fonts for the Microsoft Reader (eBook reader) the best available fonts were Berling Antiqua and Frutiger.

Humanist sans seem to be the best all round for this type of rendering - hence Lucida, Myriad, etc., being used elsewhere. But these are also the best for b/w and regular antialiasing too - Tahoma, Verdana, Prima etc.,

A font is normally large if it has a lot of charaters in it. Modifying the Reader fonts would break the EULA.

Cheers, Si

Hrant H Papazian

William, those are the Longhorn fonts.

Satyen, font files can be large if they contain a lot of codepages (especially certain expansive non-Latin scripts). As for modifying, it's illegal (at least with those fonts), but if it's for purely internal use I personally say go for it - just make sure they don't end up "floating" onto other people's drives...

The main question is: What's it for? Titles, lots of text, or what? And are you supposed to embed it in something, or just look at it yourself?

BTW, I remember when I first saw Berling chosen as the main Reader font I was disappointed, but then I realized it has more going for it than it seemed.

hhp

speter

I would have thought that Clearview and Clearface would have been the clear choices for ClearType. Oh, dear...

shawkash

If you mean by clear type: writing on screens, I choose
For titles: Virtue
For text verdana or trebuchet MS.
Serif: Lino Type Platino is working with me on screens.

Tiffany Wardle

Question in regards to Cleartype.

This is a thread started in the GENERAL area which I thought might get a few more useful eyeballs on it if it were here in the BUILD area.

Tiffany Wardle

John Hudson just posted a new thread in the GENERAL section that could be very useful to you and could very well answer your questions.

http://www.typophile.com/cgibin/show.pl?30/66808

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