New Fonts For Documents
Last
month, I introduced Segoe UI, the new user interface font for Office 12 and
Windows Vista.
Of course, you spend most of your time in Office not looking at the user
interface, but working with documents. Times New Roman has been Word's
default font since Word 6.0 introduced support for TrueType fonts. Although there are numerous other options available, most documents today
are produced in Times New Roman, Arial, or more recently the Web-friendly choice Verdana.
Office 12 ships with six brand new fonts designed for use with the content in
your document. Each of the fonts is optimized for ClearType and suitable
for use both on-screen and in printed documents.
Below, courtesy of Microsoft's Advanced Reading Technology team, are pictures of
the six new fonts along with brief descriptions of each font.
Consolas is aimed for use in programming environments and other
circumstances where a monospaced font is specified. All characters have the
same width, like old typewriters, making it a good choice for personal and
business correspondence. The improved Windows font display allowed a design
with proportions closer to normal text than traditional monospaced fonts
like Courier. This allows for more comfortably reading of extended text on
screen. OpenType features include hanging or lining numerals; slashed,
dotted and normal zeros; and alternative shapes for a number of lowercase
letters. The look of text can be tuned to personal taste by varying the
number of bars and waves.
Calibri is a modern sans serif family with subtle roundings on stems
and corners. It features real italics, small caps, and multiple numeral
sets. Its proportions allow high impact in tightly set lines of big and
small text alike. Calibri's many curves and the new rasteriser team up in
bigger sizes to reveal a warm and soft character.
Cambria has been designed for on-screen reading and to look good when
printed at small sizes. It has very even spacing and proportions. Diagonal
and vertical hairlines and serifs are relatively strong, while horizontal
serifs are small and intend to emphasize stroke endings rather than stand
out themselves. This principle is most noticeable in the italics where the
lowercase characters are subdued in style to be at their best as elements of
word-images. When Cambria is used for captions at sizes over 20 point, the
inter-character spacing should be slightly reduced for best results. The
design isn't just intended for business documents: The regular weight has
been extended with a large set of math and science symbols. The Greek and
Cyrillic has been designed under close supervision of an international team
of experts, who aimed to set a historical new standard in multi-script type
design.
Constantia is a modulated wedge-serif typeface designed primarily for
continuous text in both electronic and paper publishing. The design responds
to the recent narrowing of the gap between screen readability and
traditional print media, exploiting specific aspects of the most recent
advances in ClearType rendering, such as sub-pixel positioning. The classic
proportions of relatively small x-height and long extenders make Constantia
ideal for book and journal publishing, while the slight squareness and open
counters ensure that it remains legible even at small sizes.
Corbel is designed to give an uncluttered and clean appearance on
screen. The letter forms are open with soft, flowing curves. It is legible,
clear and functional at small sizes. At larger sizes the detailing and style
of the shapes is more apparent resulting in a modern sans serif type with a
wide range of possible uses.
Candara is a casual humanist sans with verticals showing a graceful
entasis on stems, high-branching arcades in the lowercase, large apertures
in all open forms, and unique ogee curves on diagonals. The resultant
texture is lively but not intrusive, and makes for a friendly and readable
text.
