Microsoft's ClearType Fonts

FONTS WEEK!

Microsoft is not a company to let an expensive-to-develop technology go to waste. While ClearType was present but optional in Windows XP, it's fully active in Vista - and running inside of both Internet Explorer 7 and Office 2007 regardless of the rest of the operating system.

With this in mind, Microsoft did what any self-respecting pesudo-monoploy would do: it was time for some new fonts! And like that, the ClearType Font Collection was born. The idea was simple, and in many ways, genius - with ClearType now fully integrated into the OS' text display system, develop a new set of system fonts that take full advantage of the technology to look as good as possible on both the screen and the page.

This is the sort of behavior that earned Microsoft its reputation for evil ("What, they even want us to upgrade our fonts?") but in this case they didn't get all that much flack since the new fonts are gorgeous. And, in a moment of sanity, the whole batch of fonts come free with both the Powerpoint 2007 Viewer and the Office 2007 Compatability Pack. I don't intend to be playing any Powerpoint slide decks on my machine any time soon, but the viewer has become one of the first things I install on a new machine to get those nifty fonts.

I've nicknamed them the "C-type" fonts, since they cleverly all start with the letter "C":

Calibri
Cambria
Candara
Consolas
Constantia
Corbel

(If you have them installed, those links should be using the fonts in question. If not, wiki has examples for you.)

At the same time, Calibri became the new default font in Office, replacing Times New Roman in Word and Arial in everything else. Finally we're going to get a break from TNR being the font everyone uses for everything.

As far as the rest of the bath goes, I couldn't be happier. Consolas might be the best looking mono-spaced font I've ever seen, and I think Candara is just gorgeous - If I was in college still, I'm pretty sure Candara would become my standard essay font. As for the rest? To my (mostly untrained) eye, Constantia is a better Times New Roman /Georgia, and Corbel is a better Arial / Verdana. Calibri is just sharp - possibly the perfect default font. I'm not really sure where Cambria fits in, but it's apparently designed for displaying mathematical text as it includes all manner of extra fancy math symbols. (Possibly, this is Microsoft's first step towards going after TeX with Word.)