2007/12/30

New Standard Font Set for Your Web

Microsoft is shipping great new ClearType fonts with its new operating system Windows Vista. These are beautiful fonts that are rightful replacements for obsolete fonts such Arial, Times New Roman and the like who has served as the default fonts ever since Windows 3.1.

On early release of Internet Explorer, Microsoft Microsoft release a typography project that still persists to this day: the Core fonts for the Web project. Thanks to quick adoption of Internet Explorer, and the dominance of Windows in the home OS market, these standard set of typefaces quickly found their way into the vast overwhelming majority of user's font directories - penetration to the extent that these fonts formed the basis of web design at the time, and still play an important role to this day.The core fonts consisted of the now-ubiquitous Arial, Courier New, Georgia, Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS, and Verdana, amongst others. This limited selection has formed the backbone of typography on the web.

Finally after a decade, Microsoft has released new web fonts (all begin with C as in core) shipped as default font for it's new Windows Vista OS and all-new Microsoft Office 2007 Applications Suite. Utilizing ClearType technology (Microsoft patented technique derived from subpixel rendering algorithm), all of these fonts have been expertly tuned to look great both on the screen (even LCDs) and on paper (although it's not originally designed for printing).

As webmaster, you should take advantages of these fonts by editing your CSS file to include this font, overriding the obsolete standard fonts as follow: Calibri overrides Arial, Cambria overrides Georgia, Candara/Corbel override Verdana, Consolas overrides Lucida Console / Courier New, Constantia overrides Palatino. / Book Antiqua.

Simply put the new font name in front of the old ones in CSS like this example:

<style type="text/css">
body{
font-family:Constantia,"Palatino Linotype","Book Antiqua",Palatino;
}
</style>
Below is some generic CSS classes to address font family quickly...

<style type="text/css">
.arial{font-family:Calibri,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;}
.verdana{font-family:Corbel,Verdana,"Bitstream Vera Sans",sans-serif;}
.sans{font-family:Candara,"Trebuchet MS",Trebuchet,sans-serif;}
.times{font-family:Cambria,"Times New Roman",Times,serif;}
.serif{font-family:Constantia,"Palatino Linotype",Palatino,Georgia,serif;}
.mono{font-family:Consolas,"Bitstream Vera Sans Mono","Courier New",Courier,monospace;}
</style>

For sans-serif font replacement, according to the Poynter article, Cambria is designed to serve as an “all-purpose workhorse text face,” suitable for most business applications. Constantina is designed to look consistent (and consistently beautiful) in both print and on-screen applications.

If you are non-Vista user, you can download the fonts for free and legally as part of the 2007 version of the PowerPoint Viewer available through Microsoft’s website. Install PowerPoint Viewer 2007 (it's free) and the fonts will be available in your Windows system. If you have Office 2003 installed, you can also get them by installing the “MS Office 2007 File Formats Compatibility Pack”. You might as well need to fine tune your font settings and turn on ClearType fonts with the ClearType Tuner PowerToy, or you can do this online from Microsoft Typography site (an Active-X will be installed).

More information about font and it's related web implementation:

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