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July 07, 2006
What have the Romans ever done for us?
If you have installed either Windows Vista Beta or Microsoft Office 2007 Beta, you would have noticed the emergence of new default fonts. It would be interesting to see how these new fonts "take" in typical workplace documents.
Remember life before Windows and the Mac? We used to do everything in Courier. Not Courier New, but Courier 10 point. Every character had the same width. Suited the text based console screen, Wordstar and the dot matrix printer. Proportional width fonts had to wait for GUI windows, laserjets that composed the full page in memory before they print. When that came, we embraced Times New Roman, Arial (or whatever your non Microsoft equivalents are).
Many of us still do type in Times New Roman because that is what Microsoft Word on Windows starts up with. That font family has permeated through the corporate document format as well as the web. After a while, some rebels decided that Times New Roman was boringly formal and tedious, eschewing that for Arial as the document default. Eventually, even that wasn't satisfying enough. People have been complaining that both Times New Roman and Arial are so passé. They seem so crude. So primitive. So Windows 3.1.
Lost in the midst of hot topics like the Open Document Format and the delays in the launch dates of Vista and Office 2007, is the fact that the folks at the Microsoft have now addressed this dissatisfaction by providing a brace of new fonts. Calibri will be the new black followed by Cambria, Candara, Constantia, Corbel, Nyala and of course, the Segoe(s).
Neosmart has screenshots in A Comprehensive Look at the Microsoft fonts. If you like a Scots accent, the Channel 9 interview with Bill Hill is supremely entertainin.
Although often a primary focus, changing to new fonts isn't just about print aesthetics and the corporate look. It's also about on-screen readability in the context of the eyesight of the baby boomer generation as well as modern higher resolution screens. We've come a long way from the eyes of youth and 640x480 pixels.
All good. But where does that leave the guardian(s) of the corporate document style? Will aesthetic upmanship overcome the need to keep the hardware budget under control? What about non Microsoft word processors and non Microsoft operating systems? What good is the Open Document Format when the font is not universally available or acceptable? Will people race to correct their CSS? Will the left side of the brain overcome the right side?
Posted by Anandasim at July 7, 2006 10:28 PM
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Comments
Let me point the irony here that your blog articles are by default in Times new roman itself!
I find it continuously frustrating reading ugly and boring documents written in TNR and Arial over and over and over again. That is why all the documents I write I use Garamond/Book Antiqua/Georgia and Tahoma/Verdana as alternatives.
However, just providing pretty fonts is a waste... and does not add to an individual's productivity. What is really required is a "style assistant". Not all people are adept at using the styles in Word and should be allowed a non-intrusive, simple to use wizard to pick an appropriate style for their documents (depending on their purpose).
Posted by: Sumit G ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://bleedingedge.com.au/blog/nav-commenters.gif)
at July 8, 2006 10:58 AM
Not sure about Mac, but on Linux we have had those fonts for months (except Nyala & Segoe). They're quite nice on the right screen but not too good on my older computer.
The problem is however, that for most of the typing I do, Times New Roman is a must because of the ridiculously pedantic rules of the American Psychological Society. I'm sure the same applies for a great number of University students accross the country. No doubt it will be a decade before we see change there...groan.
Posted by: Matt at July 8, 2006 11:46 AM
Good try but not quite true 8-)
The post paragraphs are actually plain html paragraphs enclosed in a div class with an attribute "post". This CSS style specifies a font sequence "georgia, tnr, times, serif". All post content is in a div class "content" which has a font sequence "verdana, Arial, sans-serif".
So, if you are on a machine which does have Georgia and Verdana, these blog entries should be displaying them.
Posted by: anandasim at July 8, 2006 12:09 PM
The blog here is most definitely in Georgia and not TNR.
I quite like the new fonts and think it's about time we got away from Arial. TNR however is still a good font in my opinion and I feel it will stay like that for a while.
Posted by: poedgirl at July 17, 2006 03:53 PM