Funny, the Microsoft monopoly rears its ugly head yet again. Fine, the type is good looking, but many of the people that care and would use it do not use PCs. I'm not going out and buying a PC for six typefaces. Sorry, MS.

I think this will prove to be impetus for more energy in the open source community to develope better and more universal techniques for using any typeface a website owns through the back end. It's been coming along any way, now linux and mac users will be forced to find a better way. This way, if you have a screen face, or a pixel font, or any typeface you want for headlines, you could use it and maintain your visual system, rather than defaulting to whatever MS mandates.

I think it's great that MS puts an emphasis on typeface design in instances like this, but it's clearly meant to exclude non-windows users. It's fine, they put the time and money into it, I'm not saying these faces should be free. I just think we're gonna see a gear shift, that's all.

It would have been nice to have more choice of proportion -- quite different x-heights for the optional sans or serif faces. Or maybe a wider body option.

Every type designer, I would imagine, given the opportunity to create for such a universal user group, wants to design the ideal face and heads for the average proportions, so as a whole the variety suffers.

Also, where is the light weight sans serif that typographers really need to add some contrast to their screen designs?

(As you can tell, I was not invited to the party.)

>whatever MS mandates

Rubbish. MS doesn't have a monopoly on typefaces. I think MS has done something very good here.

Aaron, this isn't about you. MS is constantly improving readability for 95% of users - sure they do it to gain more customers, but you can't blame one company for the flawed system that is Capitalism. I don't think much of megacorporations in general, but compared to Apple (icky full-fuzz rendering) I think the MS type boys are a godsend. And if this motivates the competitors of MS to make better stuff themselves, that's even better!

Again, I'm not a fan of MS the company.
But I am the biggest fan of fairness.

> I was not invited to the party.

How could a WRBWWRM-er (even one who quite paradoxically liked Peter's TYPO article!) ever be?

hhp

First and foremost - John Hudson -- congratulation. Constantia is really nice typeface.

Second - what is the big deal? and "the Microsoft monopoly rears its ugly head yet again" ?

I'm sure these will be very useful typefaces, I was just pointing out there isn't much range here for art directors. For instance, all the "o"s are semi-condensed. Is this because the 5 fonts are supposed to harmonize, or is it some principle of legibility? Or maybe just the shape du jour? Surely more contrast between letter shapes would be better for reading-- seems like the theorists are scared the letters will get too close together.

>WRBWWRM

That's not actually my philosophy. I've argued against some of your bouma-izing in the past, but that doesn't mean I'm from the "opposite" camp; I think reading is very complex (yes, I'm Hudsonian).

BTW, your concept of the bouma appears to be evolving.

> your concept of the bouma appears to be evolving.

I hope so! In fact in the past year or two it has moved closer to Kevin and away from Peter (although it's still much closer to Peter). Peter (whose views have also been evolving - possibly more/faster than mine) is actually further from Kevin than I am - something some people are failing to realize in their evaluation of the TYPO13 articles...

Reading is indeed extremely complex (which actually casts extra doubt on the existing empiricism), but one place I disagree with John is that improvement is moot. And Kevin and Peter both feel the way I do about that, FYI.

--

Anyway, trying to bring this back on topic: If you put too much emphasis on familiarity, releasing new screen fonts (especially ones that switch from 1-bit to grayscale for text sizes) should be dysfunctional.

hhp

>Is this because the 5 fonts are supposed to harmonize, or is it some principle of legibility?

It's because the fonts are supposed to harmonize. The Web Fonts were criticized because they didn't. I think this is covered in the book. If you don't have a copy let me know and I'll pass your mailing details on to Geraldine.

I hope to have some of the book content, and maybe some new content up on my site in the June time-frame.

Cheers, Si

While I agree with Nick that there could be more variety (in the
names too - why so similar?), this project is another example of
MS leading the industry in online typography. I can't wait to see
what they look like at smaller point sizes on screen.

It's interesting that Apple cares and does so much for design
in every other area but this one. I hope somehow these fonts can
be easily available on OS X beyond a bundle with Office -
knowing not every Mac user uses Office.

Every type designer, I would imagine, given the opportunity to create for such a universal user group, wants to design the ideal face and heads for the average proportions, so as a whole the variety suffers.

There was a conscious decision by the project planners that four of the six faces would have the same x-height so that they could be used together in the same line of text with ease. My Constantia type has a smaller x-height and longer extenders (hence, more 'bookish'), and Luc's Consolas monospaced font has a larger x-height; the others are all the same. Remember that the huge majority of people using these fonts will not be typographers, but MS Word users. So we can't expect them to be sophisticated enough to figure out how to visually harmonise different typefaces through relative scaling, so the goal was to simplify this for them by making fonts that are at least reasonably harmonised. For the same reason, the fonts have coordinated vertical metrics, so that the linespacing remains constant whichever of the fonts you employ. Yes, this is at the expense of variety, but variety was not the goal.

"It's interesting that Apple cares and does so much for design in every other area but this one."

MS = crappy browser, decent online type.

Apple = great browser, OK type.

It's a wash.

What's wrong with Firefox?

System font/rendering quality is the core issue.

hhp

Regarding the names of the new typefaces, an MS manager decided that they should all being with a hard 'C'. Not sure if there was some well-thought-out marketing plan behind that, or if it was just how he felt that afternoon. I wasn't invited to that meeting.

Constantia went through several different name options, each of which failed the extensive international trademark search at some point. You wouldn't believe how expensive international trademark searches are. When I found out, I told MS to 'call my font Cxghjrnsjl and let me have the money you save on the trademark search'. They could have afforded to commission another new type family for the amount of money they spent on trademark searches for these ones. Just when you think type designers are getting decent pay for their work, you find out how much the lawyers are making.

> variety was not the goal.

?
Well, I think we still got a good deal of it anyway!

Concerning the naming, I think the one unfortunate thing (not a biggie though) is the situation with the Greek name of "Cambria": in Greek transliteration a "b" sound is marked with mu-pi (right? like in "Corbel"'s Greek name), except in Cambria there's an "m" before the "b"! Which means somebody might pronounce it "Cabria". I assume MS did a trademark search for that too, in case a Greek business tycoon (who can't read the Latin alphabet) somehow gets a wind of this stuff... ;-)

hhp

John, Simon, thanks for your clarification.

I'll read the book and pick up the thread later.

"Just when you think type designers are getting decent pay for their work, you find out how much the lawyers are making. "

The workers in the vineyard!

I would love to explore the topic of why Apple can't seem to even acknowlage their horrible on screen font rendering?
I'm a multi-platform user (currently typing this in Safari on OSX) and I just dread reading small text on MAC. I would much rather read 1 bit aliased text anyday. (I find myself squinting even as I type this).

Why? Does MAC not bill itself as the "designers tool"?

I'm confused.

Hildebrant.

Whenever I hear Constantia, I think of that gorgeous region in South Africa surrounded by the mountains and all the beautiful vistas. I think one of the British royals used to live there, but I forget who. The British certainly did have their way with SA, and for that matter much of the world , but my comments are straying more and more away from the topic as I type. Both Constantias are beautiful. Congratulations John.

Bring back Aeneas.

> would love to explore the topic of why Apple can't seem to even acknowlage their horrible on screen font rendering?

I hear people say this, but I think the text looks great in 10.3 (Panther). Maybe it depends on the monitor. I'm using Apple flat panels and I've set the antialiasing preference to "best for flat panel" which does sub-pixel smoothing. It seems very comfortable to read to me, and I've been using computers for over twenty years. I do sit with my eyes about two feet from the monitor (I can no longer focus closer than about a foot without reading glasses), maybe that's a factor. I do agree that the earlier versions of the Quartz font smoothing were not as good, especially in the initial release of OS X.

I also have a Windows box with a flat panel display, but it's using an analog VGA connection so it looks very smeary, even with ClearType enabled. No fault of the software--just a hardware deficiency. I'm sure it would look better with a digital video adapter, although I'm not sure if the monitor supports it.