Friday, August 10, 2007

New Microsoft fonts

Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007 ship with seven new type families (Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantia, Corbel and Cariadings) known as the Microsoft ClearType Font Collection. An overview of these OpenType fonts with type specimens is available here. If you need a copy of these fonts to use on Windows XP or Macintosh computers, you can purchase the fonts on-line in OpenType format from Ascender Corporation.

4 comments:

Sammy G said...

Keith,

Excellent timing on the post. The office was recently commenting on the new Office 2007 font family, and whether we could go to jail for packaging the fonts to our PSP. I'm sure you're going to get sued just by its mention. :)

The question is whether ClearType is just a MS response to losing the font market battle, or if this could emerge as a true standards parallel to OpenType? Either way, with so much font junk already cluttering the hard drive, it's another hassle to deal with, along with the not-so-friendly embedded indexer.

Keith Gilbert said...

I'd like to clarify somthing: ClearType is not a new font standard or format. ClearType is a display technology built-in to Windows XP and Vista (on by default in Vista, off by default in XP) that helps improve the display of type on the screen.

Unfortunately, by naming the new fonts the "ClearType Font Collection" Microsoft is making it sound like this is a new font technology. It isn't. The fonts are just OpenType fonts, tuned to work well with the ClearType display technology. But the fonts will work fine on any system that can use OpenType fonts (Windows XP, Mac OS X).

BlueKDesign said...

These fonts are also available in the free Microsoft Reader download. http://www.microsoft.com/reader/downloads/pc.mspx

Keith Gilbert said...

I just downloaded Microsoft Reader onto a computer with Windows XP, and the ClearType Font Collection was not installed on the system.