New Vista Cleartype fonts: How to download them for free
By Robert Nagle
Do you want a way to download the new Vista cleartype fonts without upgrading? According to Matt Thomas, if you download the free Power Point 2007 viewer onto XP, it includes the 6 new vista fonts. That’s right; once you download the viewer, you can use the fonts in Office applications and view the fonts in the browser. Poynter Online has a user’s guide to the Vista fonts. Christian Montoya has suggestions for css substitutions.
User comments indicate some lack of support for these fonts (which are Opentype fonts) on Firefox on Mac (Firefox on Windows is ok). Already, according to Codestyle.org, 15-20% of Windows users have these Vista fonts installed on their system.
For typography fanatics, here’s an hour long downloadable video interview with Bill Hill of Microsoft about how MS uses cleartype fonts to enhance the user experience. Here are some quantitative findings mentioned in the video by Kevin Larson of MS Advanced Reading Technology division:
- performance enhancements: improved speed of recognition accuracy: 17% more accurate
- more natural tasks: sentence comprehension: 5% faster with cleartype; 2% more accurate.
- when people read an article lasting more than 5 screens, they read faster with cleartype, with a speed advantage on every page.
- finding/searching tasks in the real world: 7% increase in speed in real world tasks.
Here’s Kevin Larson’s research about the science of perception and word recognition. Kevin Larson keeps an intermittent blog about font research and tips.
See also this podcast discussion about why web typography sucks (mp3) (from SXSW).
May 27th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
[...] of Fonts –> Clear Type. I assume it’s turned on by default on Vista. (From my article on teleread about Cleartype fonts and Vista, remember these [...]