fontblog

The Art and Tradition of Typography For over 25 years Microsoft has been very focused on the development of type and type technologies. In order to fully understand the technical foundations of typography in Windows, a brief overview of some of the...

Asthenopia is the formal term for describing what is usually called eye fatigue. While eye fatigue has been around long before computers, spending many hours in front of computer monitors certainly causes eye fatigue for a lot of people. I’m keenly...

In two earlier posts I talked about studies that showed that word recognition is 17% more accurate and sentence comprehension is 5% faster with ClearType. Given these findings we should certainly expect that that there are reading benefits for ClearType...

A teacher asks Butt-head if he is angry for some reason Butt-head: Uhhhh... I’m, like, angry at numbers. Beavis: Yeah, there’s like, too many of them and stuff. If Beavis and Butthead were typographers, they would be ecstatic. For...

When Windows 2000 launched, there was a new typeface included called Palatino Linotype. What was special about it? Quite a bit actually. The description that comes with the typeface explains why. “Palatino Linotype is the definitive new version of Hermann...

Kevin Larson on our team recently had an article published in Spectrum IEEE. Here is a link to the online Version. Edit: Update link reference Edit: Update Image Reference

Now that Vista and Office 2007 have shipped, we would like to send out a pointer to some online typographic samples of the ClearType font collection. All of these brand new fonts ship with Vista, and Office 2007. Calibri and Cambria are included in Office...

In 1916 Legros & Grant published their classic printers handbook Typographical Printing-Surfaces . In a small section in the middle of the book they advocate spelling reform for a different reason than most. There have been many calls for spelling...

Typography Tip #3 recommends setting linespacing in Word to a multiple of 1.2. This has the effect of making each line of 10 point text 12 points tall. Is this a good recommendation? Yes. Miles Tinker ran a huge research program investigating typographic...

I’ve previously talked about the Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde uinervtisy hoax. The study described in that hoax has recently been carried out by a team at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the University of Durham. The data conclusively...

Changing the line spacing in your document can have a dramatic effect on the how your page will look, whether it’s a Microsoft Word document, a PowerPoint presentation or a Web page. The term ‘linespacing’ has now superseded what used...

Here is another idea for a sentence end punctuation. I call it the ambiguity mark. It is perhaps not as necessary as the irony mark; but unlike the irony mark, it has an elegant design. I found this symbol in G.G. Neill Wright’s 1952...

and of course another favorite for all things typographic is The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst. (If you can get the Hardcover, it is worth it, red ribbon pagemarker included) I promise you will find this to be an invaluable reference...

There are several books that we’ve found extremely valuable in this group that deal with topics related to type on screen. Some are technically oriented and others are typographically oriented. I’ll start off today with a technical book...

Despite the less than positive comments for the Interrobang , I would like to advocate for more sentence-end punctuation options. I spend a lot of time communicating in writing with email and IM, and wish I had more options for expression. Take the following...

One of the least heralded, but arguably most important new features of the new ClearType font collection is the support for a previously little used character—the interrobang. This character was developed in 1962 by Martin Speckter with the intention...

In a previous post I talked about the ClearType improvement in word recognition . Lee Gugerty and Rick Tyrrell at Clemson University found that ClearType improves word recognition accuracy by 17%. One of the other studies in the same publication looked...

Typography Tip #2. When justifying text in Microsoft Word use the hyphenation feature to improve the look of your page. Notice in the text block on the left, there is a lot of unnecessary “white space” distributed throughout. When hyphenation...

In September 2003, the following paragraph thundered its way around the internet, and has been an urban myth ever since. Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt...

The Courier typeface , designed by Howard “Bud” Kettler , has an interesting history which has been discussed in other places so I won’t cover that here. But, a question that sometimes gets asked is why the Courier New font that ships with Windows is...

Most Windows systems are shipped with the display DPI set to 96 PPI . (I’ll use the term PPI in this blog entry as it more accurately reflects usage for computer screens while DPI is more common for print usage. Windows tends to use the DPI acronym...

Typography Tip #1. When writing your email, or documents, only use one space after a period. period!

Most people agree that ClearType makes text look nicer, especially when tuned . But does it help us read more efficiently? This is a difficult question because adult readers can read at a very fast rate – good readers can read 250-300 words per...

Stuck in a rut, boxed in by restraints, griddled by grids? You know what I love? Beautiful type. Gorgeous books, letterpress, ink and the swish of the pen. The flow of thought communicated through the way words are placed on a page, and the artistry...

My name is Greg Hitchcock, and I’m a software architect in the Advanced Reading Technologies team. One of the purposes of this blog is to show the passion we have for improving the reading experience on-screen, and I hope that through the postings of...