Who Has Which Fonts?

Category: Fonts | Comment 0 Comments | Read 9599 Read | Posted Posted: VistaTrick | 12 November 2007

We've now dispensed with how you get at all of the characters that you may have hidden away within your fonts. So we turn to an equally important question: How do you know which fonts you have?

And just as important is this: Which fonts do other computer users have? This issue is cru- cial to whether you can send a document file to someone else and have them correctly see it the way you do on your screen and printer. If you post a document on the Internet, does it look fine to those who read and print it, or does it look like your cat was walking across your keyboard at the time?

These aren’t easy questions to answer. We’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time research- ing every font name that ever shipped with Windows or other major Microsoft products. Now we’re ready to announce who has which fonts!

Love at First Sort, or Baby, You’re My Type

To make this information understandable, we first need to let you in on which versions of Windows — and therefore which users — have which fonts. A font that first reached Windows users only with the release of Vista will be present on far fewer systems than a font that’s been around since clay tablets.

It turns out that many things are actually sorted kind of randomly when you put them into alphabetical lists. That’s more true of font lists than almost anything else.

So we’re not presenting you in this chapter with the frustrating avalanche-page-of-fonts that’s found in the typical alphabetical listing. Instead, it makes the most sense to under- standing the Windows fonts if we sort them from those that are the most prevalent to those that have just seen the light of day and are still rare.

In brief, these are:

Fonts that all Windows users have: These are the TrueType fonts that you find wherever Windows is booted up. That’s because these fonts have been in the product since before Bill Gates was born. That means they were installed by default in Windows NT 4, Windows 95, Windows 98, and on up the ladder. These fonts are like cockroaches; you’ll never be able to get rid of them.

Fonts that practically all Windows users have: These include the fonts that come with Windows 98/Me (which are practically the same operating system), Windows 2000, and everything since then. There aren’t that many Windows users who are still running NT or Win95 nowadays. And even they probably received this group of fonts while in the process of installing Microsoft Office, an IE upgrade, or the like. Combined with the fonts from Group 1, these are the fonts that nearly all Windows users and most Mac users can be counted on to have.

Fonts that most users have, since they have W2K, XP, or Vista: The sweet spot in the installed base, as this book is published, is Windows 2000/Windows XP.
These operating systems represent the vast majority of PCs in use today. Some of
Microsoft’s once famous Core Fonts for the Web were first bundled into Windows
2000 (although they were available before that). This group of fonts, therefore, is very widely installed, but by no means can you expect that all Windows users have them.

Fonts that were first shipped with Vista: Windows XP wasn’t much on the font front, so that left it to Vista to ship with a whole new gaggle of fonts at no extra cost. This is a fascinating category of fonts that have many attractive features, but most Windows users don’t have them installed yet.

Tip: We’ve assembled the lists in this chapter by referring to a Microsoft mini-search engine on the Web. This form catalogs every font the Redmond company has shipped with any of its software products in history. If you’d like to see which packages you might be able to purchase to obtain particular fonts, query the form at www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/default.aspx.

Displaying Font Samples the Fastest Way

First of all, let us explain the meaning of the following cryptic sentence, which you’ll find in the font listings that follow:

Mr. Jock, TV quiz Ph.D., bags few lynx.

This is the shortest grammatically correct sentence that uses every letter in the English alphabet at least once. Actually, it’s tied for shortest (more on that in a moment). There can’t be one that’s shorter, because the sentence above uses each of the 26 letters exactly once. William Gillespie, who collects these isogrammatic pangrams — nonrepeating sentences that use every letter — explains that the sentence above was discovered by one Clement Woods. As a phrase, the pangram could be interpreted to mean, “Jock has no time for hunting game animals because he’s busy showing off his doctoral degree on game shows” (see www.spinelessbooks.com/table/forms/pangram.html).

We’ll be the first to admit that, although it may be a perfect pangram, it isn’t necessarily an ideal way to display font samples. But it is blessedly short. That allowed us to make each font as large as possible and still fit on a single line across the page.

And it’s a more coherent sentence, you’ll have to admit, than the alternatives that were pre- sented to us at Gillespie’s site (http://rinkworks.com/words/pangrams.shtml) and elsewhere:

XV quick nymphs beg fjord waltz.

Blowsy night-frumps vex’d by NJ IQ.

Now, without further ado, let’s find out which fonts people actually have.

The Fonts Everyone Has

In the remainder of this chapter, we’re going to catalog those fonts that have been intro- duced in a particular version of Windows and have stayed in Windows ever since. Most Windows systems have a far greater number of fonts installed than we show here. But if a font appeared in, say, Windows 2000 and wasn’t included in future versions of Windows, it’s not a very good candidate for a font that you can assume all Windows users have. Figure 7-7 illustrates those fonts that you can say with confidence, “Every Windows user has these fonts.”

Figure 7-7: The fonts everyone has. Have you seen these fonts? Sure. Windows has included a nice basic variety for many years. There are solid sans-serif and serif fonts, two monospaced fonts, an early Unicode font, and three pictorial (symbol) fonts.

Arial and Times New Roman are well known as the most widely used fonts in Windows. Lucida Sans Unicode is, in truth, the most interesting font in this bunch. The version installed in Windows XP contains more than 1,700 characters.

That pales in the face of Arial Unicode MS, which can render more than 50,000 glyphs. This font, unfortunately, has never been included in any version of Windows, only as part of Microsoft Office 2000 and higher, which not everyone owns.

Arial Unicode MS also wasn’t included in beta copies of Windows Vista, although Microsoft could always change its mind and add it in. We think Microsoft should widely and freely distribute this font so most people will eventually have it installed.

Until then, if you want to be sure your readers can see some little-used character from the WGL4 set, Lucida Sans Unicode probably has the glyph — and you know the font is installed everywhere.

The Fonts Virtually Everyone Has

Figure 7-8 shows several fonts that were first installed by default in Windows 98. More important, they’ve been able to stick around in the operating system ever since that time.

Figure 7-8: The fonts almost everyone has. Since there are hardly any boxes running Windows95 any more, the list in this figure, plus the ones in Figure 7-7, can be considered to comprise a universal set of fonts that all Windows users, and most Mac users, have installed.

Several other fonts have made an appearance in one version of Windows or another, only to disappear without a trace thereafter. (Remember Century Gothic? Four complete weights appeared in Windows 98/Me and then went missing in every future version. Licensing snafus? Greedy font owners? Cheapskate software billionaires? Who knows.)

Tahoma was introduced as the user-interface font for Office 97, continuing that role in Office 2000/XP/2003. It became the user interface font for Windows 98, too, and has held that position until Vista came out.

Verdana is the sleeper in this group. It’s a slightly expanded version of Tahoma and has attracted many adherents among Webmasters, who believe it’s more readable on-screen than Arial. Actually, Verdana does have wider lowercase characters, which look much better on-screen at 8 pt. than does Arial. The old stalwart Arial, however, prints more gracefully than Verdana and looks better on-screen as well, at sizes of 10 pt. and above.

Arial Black and Impact are Microsoft’s ugliest fonts. The idea behind Impact is good — a truly extrabold font — but the typeface is unreadable on-screen at anything less than bill- board-size.

The Fonts Most, But Not All, Users Have

Figure 7-9 rounds out our list of fonts that the majority of Windows users have installed. Windows 2000, and especially Windows XP two years later, established Georgia and Trebuchet MS as fonts that will have long lives and large installed user bases.

These two faces were part of the “Core Fonts for the Web” package, 11 families of type
(most with four full weights) that Microsoft freely distributed at that time. This was designed to encourage Webmasters to specify more legible fonts on their pages. It seems to have worked quite well, since many now use some new-core font, especially Georgia, with Times as a fall-back selection.

By contrast, MS Sans Serif is uninteresting. It has no WGL4 characters, not even the “mid- dle ANSI” set, and it has no weights other than roman.

Figure 7-9: The fonts most Windows users have. Systems running Windows 2000, XP, and
Vista include these fonts.

The other Core Fonts for the Web — Arial, Arial Black, Comic Sans, Courier New, Impact, Times New Roman, Verdana, and Webdings — are files that most Windows users already have and don’t need to download again. Microsoft gave these faces away primarily to expand the installed base of these fonts to Apple users (OS X supports both TrueType and OpenType fonts) and Windows 95/98 users who’d never received the fonts by upgrading to Internet Explorer (IE) 5.

Tip: The most purely practical face in the Core Fonts for the Web group is Andale Mono. This font has a minor cult following among Windows developers, who prize it for its fixed monospacing and the dot inside its numeral 0. (This makes it easy to distinguish from the letter O when plowing through dense thickets of code.)

Strangely, Andale Mono was included with the standalone Internet Explorer 5 download and the Core Fonts, but it’s done a disappearing act since then. It’s never been included in any version of Windows, despite the font’s usefulness as a super-legible font.

See “You Can Still Get the Core Fonts That MS Pulled” elsewhere in this chapter to find
font samples and current download locations for Andale Mono.

You Can Still Get the Core Fonts That Microsoft Pulled

Microsoft withdrew the 11 type families of the Core Fonts for the Web from its site in
2002. If you have a computer that lacks any of the fonts in this set, however, you can still download them from the Internet for free.

SourceForge.net, a hub of open-source development activity, noted that the license agreement of the Core Fonts states that the fonts can be freely distributed along with any programming project. SourceForge is a giant programming project (perhaps not exactly what Microsoft had in mind, though). So all 11 families are packaged up as self-extracting executables ready for installation at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=34153&package_id=56408&release_id=105355.

To look at samples of the fonts before downloading them, go to www.serbski-institut.de/wgl4fonts.htm.

Caution: Don’t install these 2000-era fonts if you already have them installed in your font list. Windows XP and Vista have newer versions of these fonts, which include slightly better character sets, hints, and so forth. Install these font packages only if you don’t already have a certain typeface family, as would be the case for some users of Windows
95/98/Me, Mac, and Linux.

The New Vista Font Collection

Windows Vista introduces a rather high number of new fonts for a new release of
Windows.

It isn’t the champ. According to Microsoft’s font query form that we mentioned earlier, Windows 2000 added 90 new font files (counting bold, bold italic, and other weights as separate files) that had never before appeared in Windows. Vista adds only 44 new files. But many of the new fonts in Windows 2000 were dedicated to particular language groups, such as Simplified Arabic, Rod (Hebrew), and SimHei (Asian), which most Windows users in Europe and the Americas will never need.

Windows Vista, by contrast, includes ten — count ‘em, ten — new font families, most with a complete set of weights, that are specifically designed for Western users.

Figure 7-10 shows these ten new font families. Learning the best way to take advantage of these new faces will pay off for any Windows user who wants his or her documents to look attractive and distinctive.

We’ve taken the liberty of listing the fonts slightly out of alphabetical order in Figure 7-10. This allows us to place together the serif, sans-serif, and user interface fonts.

Figure 7-10: Important new fonts for Latin and Roman language groups in Windows Vista. Not shown here are Meiryo (Japanese and Latin) and Cariadings, a symbol font.

The New C Fonts

By far the most important of the new fonts are six typeface families, the names of which all begin with the letter C.

The development of these new type families was a fairly big deal within Microsoft. The project took two years, from January 2003 to November 2004, according to the company. The design goal was to develop fonts from the ground up that would take maximum advantage of ClearType. ClearType is a technique, enabled by default in Vista, that makes the edges of type look smoother on digital LCD screens. (This has its downsides; see the Secret section titled “Vista’s New Fonts Aren’t Hinted” later in this chapter.) Microsoft contracted with a variety of type designers to create the C families and two other new fonts:

Calibri and Consolas — Lucas de Groot, The Netherlands
Cambria — Jelle Bosma, The Netherlands
Candara — Gary Munch, U.S. Constantia — John Hudson, Canada Corbel — Jeremy Tankard, U.K.
Meiryo (Japanese) — Eiichi Kono, Takehary Suzuki, and Matthew Carter
Cariadings (dingbats) — Geraldine Wade, a ClearType program manager

A healthy visual balance among Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic characters was a significant objective in the development of the C fonts. Characters from the three different language groupings are intended to appear in proportion with each other when displayed together on the same page. This isn’t always the case for fonts that weren’t designed with such compatibility in mind.

Similarly, the Meiryo font is designed for visual harmony when Japanese and Latin char- acters are mixed on the same line (see Figure 7-11).

Sources within Microsoft tell us that naming all the C fonts with the same initial letter was a conscious decision. It would be easier for Vista users to find the new fonts, it was felt, if scrolling to C in a Fonts drop-down box displayed the new fonts in close proximity.

In reality, giving all these fonts names that are so similar makes it very hard for people to remember which font is which. Follow with us, then, as we explain how to tell these fonts apart and how to put them to their best use.

The Serif Fonts

Cambria and Constantia are the two new serif fonts. Cambria is a bit more like Times
New Roman in design, whereas Constantia tends more toward Palatino.
We help ourselves remember which of the two C fonts are the serif ones using this dog- gerel phrase: “I drove my Camry to Constantinople.”

Figure 7-11: Meiryo was designed so that Japanese and Latin glyphs, when used together, are visually in balance, as shown in the WordPad window at right. You can use CharMap.exe, shown at left, to find which glyphs are located at which positions in any TrueType or OpenType font.

The Sans-Serif Fonts

Calibri, Candara, and Corbel are the three new sans-serif fonts.

Calibri is the most like Arial.
Candara is more like Optima, with strokes that slightly curve or flare when viewed at larger sizes. We remind ourselves that Candara has flared strokes by thinking: “Candara is tapered like a candle.” (Its strokes are tapered in, not out like a candle, but still.)
Corbel is the sans-serif font that may have the greatest application on Web pages and in small sizes. It’s the most like Verdana in this respect.

Corbel has wide, open letterforms. This is especially true in the open tail of the lowercase g, which doesn’t close as in most other fonts, and the lowercase u, which has no final downward stroke on its right side but merely curls upward, like a bowl. Characteristics such as these should make this font clean and read- able onscreen, even when used in relatively small footnotes and the like.

DaunPenh, the Graceful Font

DaunPenh is a graceful serif face that would be ideal for long blocks of text, as in a book- length work. It’s more like the writings of a calligraphic pen (Penh, get it?) than any of the other Vista fonts.

Unfortunately, DaunPenh (as of this writing) is available only in roman in its Vista incar- nation, with no italic or bold weights. This severely reduces its usefulness in documents. Unless Microsoft provides these additional forms of emphasis, DaunPenh is likely to remain a typographical curiosity and won’t be widely used.

The Segoe Fonts

Segoe UI is the new user-interface font in both Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007. Unlike the UI fonts that were previously employed in Windows XP and Office, Segoe UI supports bold, italic, and bold italic weights. This means you might use this font in docu- ments, like any other font.

Segoe is pronounced see-go. This name appears to be a nod to the font’s use in Windows
Vista and Office menus. (See and go.)

Segoe Print and Segoe Script are slightly slanted fonts that resemble hand printing and handwriting, respectively.

These pen-drawn fonts have nothing visually in common with Segoe UI. It was a terrible mistake to give these whimsical fonts such similar names to Vista’s no-nonsense user- interface font.

However, aside from the confusion over the names, Segoe Print and Script (and their bold weights) are likely to replace Comic Sans MS as Windows users’ favorite handwriting- imitation fonts. For one thing, Segoe Print and Script look a lot more as though someone might actually have written the words by hand. Like Comic Sans MS, Segoe Print and Segoe Script have bold weights but no italic or bold italic weights.

Vista’s New Fonts Aren’t Hinted

The new Windows C fonts and the Segoe UI user interface font are welcome addi- tions. But they may look blurry to you on screen because they don’t use black-and- white or grayscale hints like Microsoft’s previous TrueType fonts. Instead, they’re designed to look best on an LCD screen with the ClearType feature of XP and Vista turned on.

Microsoft insiders say the new Vista fonts weren’t hinted because it’s very expensive, and the company didn’t want to spend the money. In addition, the fonts wouldn’t have been ready to ship with Vista because of the time required for hinting, these sources say. Microsoft extensively hinted such TrueType stalwarts as Arial, Times New Roman, and Verdana in years past when widespread adoption of these new fonts was a top priority for the company.

ClearType is best at making fonts look clearer on screen only if all of the following are true:

• The display is an LCD screen, not a CRT.
• The LCD is using a digital, not an analog, interface.
• The LCD is running at its native resolution, not higher or lower.
• The display is using true color (24-bit or higher, not 16-bit or 8-bit).
• ClearType is tuned to the LCD’s resolution, striping format, and gamma value.
• ClearType is enabled (ClearType on a fresh install defaults to on in Vista and off
in XP; it’s unavailable in Windows NT, 2000, 95, 98, and Me).

If any of these conditions is not met, ClearType fails to function with no warning to the user. In that case, fonts that depend on ClearType smoothing, and are not hinted, simply look worse.

The effect of ClearType seems to vary from person to person. Some people love it and some hate it. If you find that fonts look fuzzy in Vista, try enabling and disabling ClearType. In Vista, you do this by running the Customize Colors control panel.

To tune ClearType, and for more information, visit Microsoft’s ClearType Tuner page, www.microsoft.com/typography/ClearType/tuner/Step1.aspx (requires Internet Explorer).

If these steps don’t help, you may need to configure Vista to use a font other than Segoe UI for its user interface. At this writing, it’s unclear (no pun intended) to what extent Vista and Office 2007 will allow that. As a last resort, you can move the Segoe UI font files from C:\Windows\Fonts to another folder you create, such as C:\Windows\UnusedFonts. (You may need to move the fonts in a command prompt window, since Vista doesn’t allow moving fonts in the Control Panel.) Without delet- ing the fonts, moving them makes them unusable by Windows, in which case menus may fall back to a TrueType font that is well-hinted, such as Arial or Verdana. Microsoft provides the following greatly magnified illustrations (Figure 7-12 and Figure 7-13) of how hinting and ClearType smoothing work:

Figure 7-12: TrueType hinting is a form of grid fitting. The outline of each TrueType character is adjusted so the strokes fall more directly on a screen’s grid of pixels.
This makes letters more symmetrical and easier to read.

Figure 7-13: ClearType smoothing uses subpixel addressing. An LCD screen is made up of vertical stripes of red, green, and blue. Tiny sectors of each stripe, smaller than a pixel, can be lightened or darkened to make characters look smoother.

More information on hinting and ClearType is provided at http://www.microsoft.com/typography/TrueTypeHintingIntro.mspx

and http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ClearTypeInfo.mspx..

What If Your PC Doesn’t Have the Vista Fonts?

Microsoft hasn’t exactly said at this writing how computer users other than users of Windows Vista will be able to get the new C and Segoe fonts. Since they’re ordinary TrueType/OpenType fonts, however, they’ll work on any flavor of Windows from version
3.1 up, any recent version of Apple Macs, and any build of Linux that supports the ttmkfdir command (which displays a file directory of any TrueType fonts that are installed).

Moving TrueType Fonts

If you have a Windows Vista machine and a licensed copy of a previous version of Windows on any other machine, you can move the new Vista fonts from one machine to the other.

If the two PCs are on a local area network, open the Fonts control panel on the PC that doesn’t have the fonts. Select Install new font, then click the Network button, and navigate to the C:\Windows\Fonts folder of the Vista machine. Select the C and Segoe fonts, then click Install. The fonts should immediately become available.

If the two PCs aren’t networked, you can move the individual font files from the Vista machine to a USB Flash drive or writable CD. Do this at a command prompt if it’s not possible in the Fonts control panel or Windows Explorer. Insert the drive or CD into the other machine, then select Install new font in the Fonts control panel to install the files to the C:\Windows\Fonts folder of that machine.

For example, the files for Calibri (including bold, italic, and bold italic) are named Calibri.ttf, Calibrib.ttf, Calibrii.ttf, and Calibriz.ttf. Installing these files to the Fonts folder should make them immediately available, without a system reboot or even closing and reopening any applications. Just pull down a Fonts menu to see that the new fonts are there.

Moving TrueType fonts to a folder other than C:\Windows\Fonts (if you ever need to do this) makes the fonts immediately unavailable to Windows and all applications.

At this writing, the capability of Vista’s Fonts control panel to move fonts (as opposed to installing them from a separate location) was in flux. For more details, see http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2006/08/27/726378.aspx.

Who’s Running Which Versions of Windows?

Now that you know which fonts are included in each version of Windows, you can do a simple calculation to see which fonts are installed on most people’s computers.
A study by AssetMetrix of businesses in the United States and Canada in June 2005 found that companies were using the various flavors of Windows in the proportions shown in Table 7-1.

These figures suggest that the vast majority of business users were running Windows
2000 or XP before Vista became available. Since Microsoft’s support for Windows 2000
has expired since the study was done, XP has replaced Win2K in many businesses.

What about consumers, however? To measure the use of different operating systems by all individuals, TheCounter.com monitors the different operating systems used by people to browse to a variety of web sites. The proportions found in March 2006 are shown in Table 7-2.

Remember, the figures are derived from people browsing the Web. Servers and other seri- ous workstations are not commonly used for web surfing. It’s likely, for example, that there are many times more Unix computers than devices running Microsoft’s obsolete WebTV, but TheCounter.com’s figures show only twice as many Unix machines. For the latest figures, see www.thecounter.com/stats/.

Knowing that the figures aren’t exact, we still think it’s safe to make the following statement:

If you’re distributing a document that will be viewed or printed by other people, use the fonts that are found in Windows 98 and Macs. This means your fonts will be visible to about 98 percent of computer users.

That boils down to the fonts we show in Figures 9-7 and 9-8. It’s an okay selection but not, frankly, a great selection.

What if you’d like to prepare and distribute documents using fonts that are a bit more exciting and updated? See “The document you save could be your own” tip.

Tip: The document you save could be your own.

You can make sure your word-processing .doc files and other documents can be viewed and printed with the fonts you selected intact if you follow these rules:

Case 1. You’re the only person who’ll be editing, viewing, and printing the doc- ument. If you’re just planning to print copies of a document and distribute hard copies of it to others, use any dang fonts you want. If it looks okay to you on-screen and it prints okay, you’re fine.

Case 2. You’re going to distribute the file only within your department. Let’s say you want the file you create to be viewed, edited, or printed by people other than yourself. If those people are all close co-workers, and you know they all use at least Windows XP or Vista, go ahead and use in the document any of the fonts that are found in XP.

You could also save your document using the new Windows Vista XML Paper Specification (XPS) format. If anyone in your department doesn’t use Vista, they’ll need Windows Server 2003 or XP SP2 and higher and must install Microsoft’s WinFX viewer
(www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/default.mspx).

Case 3. You’re going to distribute the file widely. If the file will be viewed or printed by people you may not know, you can’t guarantee which fonts they’ll have installed. Therefore, you need to save the document with the fonts intact. (This is called embedding the fonts.) Many applications support a command to do this. In Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, for example, click Tools➪Options. On the Save tab, turn on Embed TrueType fonts. Most TrueType fonts are embeddable. (In the worst case, a document using embedded fonts can be viewed and printed by recipients but not edited.) You can check fonts in advance using the Embedding tab in Microsoft’s free Font Properties Extension (www.microsoft.com/typography/TrueTypeProperty21.mspx).

Case 4. You’re going to distribute the file on the Internet. To make sure a docu- ment that will be accessible worldwide will use the fonts you selected, you’ll need to save it as a PDF file using Adobe Acrobat or a compatible program. Anyone can open and print the file using the free Adobe Reader, which runs on Windows, Macs, Linux
and other computers (www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2_allversions.html).

| Rate: 10 / 2 | Printing Page

Print

Comments

No Comments

STATISTICS

SEARCH

MOSTLY VIEWED

LATEST COMMENTS

Who Has Which Fonts?

Comments

Post Comment