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Changing The Typeface Of The Web (Part 2)

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Core fonts

Until these various problems with web font delivery were sorted out, it was important to do what you could with those few fonts you could assume the end user would have installed – always remembering to provide fallback positions in case they didn’t – and here Microsoft again led the way with its “Core fonts for the Web” project. This was a package of TrueType fonts – Andale Mono, Arial, Arial Black, Comic Sans MS, Courier New, Georgia, Impact, Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS, Verdana and Webdings – that was freely available for both Windows and Mac. Unfortunately, these fonts didn’t become universal (which immediately meant you shouldn’t use Wingdings, because it couldn’t degrade gracefully to another front) and, in any case, could hardly claim to be extending the boundaries of web typography. Arguably, it set standards back, with Comic Sans being notoriously prone to misuse – for example, in CERN’s presentation regarding the discovery of the Higgs boson.

Microsoft deserves great credit for commissioning font designer Matthew Carter to produce these new screen-optimized faces

Microsoft deserves great credit for commissioning font designer Matthew Carter to produce these new screen-optimized faces

There were two honorable exceptions, however, in Georgia and Verdana. Microsoft deserves great credit for commissioning font designer Matthew Carter to produce these new screen-optimized faces, and Carter deserves the same credit for realizing that he needed to start from hand-crafted bitmaps and then apply advanced hinting to match font outlines to the available pixels, rather than from simple outlines that would rasterize well.

As a result, these fonts change shape considerably to render optimally even at the smallest sizes – where strokes are a single pixel wide – but still manage to maintain an overall identity. Their large x-heights, their clear distinguishing between similar characters such as 1, l and I, and their expansive spacing that boosts legibility and long-form readability are all reasons why these two web-font workhorses became almost universal across the PC, Macs and billions of web pages.

Progress… and problems

Georgia and Verdana do a superb job of making the most of the least number of pixels, but a clear need remained for improved type rendering. Screen delivery differs from paper in this regard, because you can vary the grey scale of each pixel through anti-aliasing to simulate the partial presence of a letterform, fooling the eye into an impression of greater resolution. The launch of Windows XP in 2001 with its anti-aliased rendering was a huge step forward, although web designers were still constrained by the knowledge that Windows 98 lacked such advances.

Georgia and Verdana do a superb job of making the most of the least number of pixels, but a clear need remained for improved type rendering

Georgia and Verdana do a superb job of making the most of the least number of pixels, but a clear need remained for improved type rendering

The next trick was to vary the separate red, green and blue elements that make up each pixel to produce “subpixel” anti-aliasing. The 2007 Windows Vista made this ClearType rendering the new default, another red-letter day for web typography.

ClearType is a form of sub-pixel font rendering that draws text using a pixel's red-green-blue (RGB) components separately instead of using the entire pixel.

ClearType is a form of sub-pixel font rendering that draws text using a pixel's red-green-blue (RGB) components separately instead of using the entire pixel.

The font-smoothing effect of subpixel anti-aliasing isn’t perfect, since it works only along the horizontal axis and can produce undesirable color fringes, but it does dramatically improve the capability of a screen for high-quality type over and above the ever-increasing pixel density.

Font smoothing – An anti-aliasing algorithm used to minimize distortion of fonts on monitors

Font smoothing – An anti-aliasing algorithm used to minimize distortion of fonts on monitors

However, there was a new showstopper in sight. Back in my 2002 book I assumed that support for font embedding would soon become universal, since it only required Microsoft to open up EOT, and Netscape and Opera to support it. That proved naïve, and the success of Firefox and Safari meant the proportion of end users who could see web fonts began to fall. With the dream of universal delivery fading, fewer designers bothered to embed EOTs, and in 2003 Microsoft stopped developing WEFT altogether (although it’s still available). With the launch of CSS 2.1, support for @font-face embedding was dropped entirely, and it looked as though the web had made its choice – the typographic possibilities for the most important communication medium since paper would shrivel to a choice between Georgia and Verdana.

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