I Guess No One Cares About Fonts

re: I Guess No One Cares About Fonts

S. Liu — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 18:18:27 GMT

When the cleartype is off the font looks awful

re: I Guess No One Cares About Fonts

notnow — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 19:11:10 GMT

Segoe UI Regular and Italic are differnt! Look at the "a"...

re: I Guess No One Cares About Fonts

Ilya Birman — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 19:38:11 GMT

2notnow:

First of all, it's normal and it's the way it SHOULD be. Check most of the font families, regular and italic a's ARE different (start with Times New Roman, then try Trebuchet MS). And this is what Simon points out himself:

"Unlike Verdana and Frutiger the typeface has a lively true italic, not based on an obliqued or slanted regular style."

See? Please check Google for difference between "italic" and "oblique".

re: I Guess No One Cares About Fonts

Eric K. — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 19:40:36 GMT

In a way, it can be said that I don't care about fonts. Then again, I do to some extent.

As a user and a developer, I don't look to fonts to accomplish anything more than enhance the readability of the text or code that I'm working with. Nothing more, nothing less. I'm not looking to fonts to evoke a particular mood unless that mood has something to do with concentration.

I'm expressly trying not to see the *font*, but rather the characters and their meanings. Fonts are a tool to enhance my ability to do so.

For reading, I prefer a proportional font that's very clean and clear and presents the individual characters in such a way that there's no chance at all I could confuse one letter for another even for the briefest moment. I want a font that, at its tiniest, is still very readable.

I want the same things for programming, though I want a monospace font instead, with just barely enough whitespace around each letter that they're visibly separated, but not so much that lines appear double-spaced as do many monospaced fonts.

To professionals in the field of typefaces, fonts may be an art form, but to the rest of us, it's like camerawork at a dance competition: If the cameraman's so busy showing us his art and all the camera angles and motion and tight zoom shots he's capable of, how can we properly enjoy the dance competition that's the viewer/user's real interest?

If I'm busy paying attention to the font, I'm not paying attention to the words.

re: I Guess No One Cares About Fonts

Gabe — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 19:48:42 GMT

Why do you speak of rendering at 8/9/10pt sizes, when the real issue is how many pixels tall they are? I mean, even an 8pt font will be 280 dots tall on a 2540dpi imagesetter! Isn't the point that you want the font to look good at 10 pixels tall no matter what the resolution of the output device?

Also, what is a TV font? Is it one that's specially designed for titles, or does it just have lots of TV network logos?

BTW, I really like the italic version of Segoe.

re: I Guess No One Cares About Fonts

Si — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 19:58:31 GMT

8/9/10pt at 96dpi - so these are 11, 12 and 13 ppem (pixels per em).

The TV verison is used by MSNTV and MSTV devices for displaying content on TVs.

Cheers, Si

Neutral Sans

Si — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 22:02:44 GMT

>If I'm busy paying attention to the font, I'm not paying attention to the words.

Eric’s comment hits the nail on the head and also goes a long way to explain why we picked a neutral humanist sans serif typeface free of the quirky gimmicks we see in many sans faces – for more on the neutral sans concept see this article - http://www.creativepro.com/story/feature/22491.html

That’s not to say quirky sans don’t have their place - http://www.ascendercorp.com/pr/pr2005_10_18.html

re: I Guess No One Cares About Fonts

Collin Yeadon — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 22:36:15 GMT

Hmm.. I suppose that is a nice enough font. How clean is it at 10-12pt?

My new favorite font is Myriad Web Condensed, for some reason Segoe UI puts me in mind of Myriad Web. It is nice to take a break from Arial, Verdana and Tahoma.

re: I Guess No One Cares About Fonts

Fadi — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 01:19:35 GMT

Times New Roman is the most widely used font in Lebanon. I love Comic Sans MS.

re: I Guess No One Cares About Fonts

rb — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 10:11:20 GMT

How do you pronounce "Segoe"?

re: I Guess No One Cares About Fonts

Tim Dawson — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 15:38:08 GMT

See-go

The name

Si — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 18:00:12 GMT

See-Go is close enough, have heard Seg-Oh too. When Monotype originally made the font they were naming them after street names, other examples being Albany, Thorndale and Cumberland. Segoe was named after a street in Madison, Wisconsin, and my understanding is the locals pronounce it See-Go.

re: I Guess No One Cares About Fonts

Jason — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 19:21:09 GMT

Being a local of Madison Wisconsin, See-Go is the correct pronounciation (or at least that's how I say it.)

Ladislas Segoe

Si — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 20:19:04 GMT

For those who might be interested Segoe Street in Madison is named for city-planner Ladislas Segoe...

http://ucplanning.uc.edu/general/Segoe_Symposium.php

re: I Guess No One Cares About Fonts

Dave Solimini — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 21:48:40 GMT

Having found a copy of Segoe UI online and set it as my default system font... i have to say its awfully nice and pleasing to read. well done. (Cleartype on a laptop 14.1 LCD)

re: I Guess No One Cares About Fonts

Mario Goebbels — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 01:20:46 GMT

Regarding the fonts, you guys kinda ruined Calibri by taking out old style lined numbers. :(

re: I Guess No One Cares About Fonts

Si — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 02:08:44 GMT

The OSF's are still in the font - you just need to use the OpenType feature to get them.

re: I Guess No One Cares About Fonts

Marius Greuel — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 14:09:23 GMT

To comment on Julie's post: I also prefer the standard font smoothing over the ClearType one. ClearType *does* look fuzzy to me. I am typing this on a Viewsonic VX2000 LCD connected via DVI and I spend a lot of time trying to optimize the ClearType settings with no success: I do see irritating shadows and wrong colors when using the ClearType engine, and I am not sitting to close to the screen (according to the guy who is in charge of ergonomics). I had several co-workers look at ClearType, and there are a few that hate ClearType just as I do. Those are the same that can tell the difference between an LCD hooked up via an analog cable or via DVI.

In my opinion, the standard font smoothing engine is very much superior especially at displaying small font sizes such as GUI font sizes. For instance, if there is a vertical line that is one and one-third pixels wide, the standard rendering engine does the right thing: It displays just a *single* line of vertical pixels, instead of adding a grey line (or whatever color) of vertical pixels in order to make up for the 'missing' one-third pixel width.

Unless we have resolutions of 16000x12000 on a 20" display in the future, I strongly hope that Microsoft will always provide an option to turn ClearType off.

Thanks for listening! -Marius

re: I Guess No One Cares About Fonts

Si — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 19:52:20 GMT

Hi Marius,

As this is a comment attached to an old post you might want to re-post your thoughts over at the fontblog...

http://blogs.msdn.com/fontblog/

…with respect to turning off ClearType in Windows Vista, I'm sure someone will post instructions on how to hack this for the Windows Vista GDI based text. But then you'll be presented with ClearType tuned fonts under bi-level rendering and I think you'll find these will look significantly worse *to you* than ClearType.

Then there’s WPF (formerly Avalon) which is ClearType only. It doesn’t have a bi-level rendering mode. So in the case of WPF apps you’ll only see ClearType.

So given the fact the new Office default fonts are ClearType fonts, that WPF only supports ClearType and that Windows GDI UI components will use ClearType-targeted fonts, it will be very difficult to remain in the bi-level world even if you don’t upgrade to Windows Vista.

Cheers, Si

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