Fonts

Windows Vista may offer you a wealth of fonts - but finding them and discovering the hidden features of each one is a challenging task.

Windows Has a Lot of Strange Characters Windows Vista gives you The Joy of Fonts. Vista makes it easier than ever to use fonts in your documents and make them look the way you want them to look. It’s hard to conceive today, but as recently as the 1980s, you could only get computer printouts using heavy line printers that output in ALL CAPS or daisywheel printers that were slow and noisy. Even when Windows 3.0 became wildly popular in 1990, it was tough to get printouts from it that looked good. Laser printers had become available by then, but they cost several thousand dollars and typically offered only rough, 300-dpi resolution. Worse, Windows users actually had to purchase and run their own font-generating utilities. To print a document in a typeface other than the basic Courier-style fonts burned into the firmware of those early HP LaserJet printers, you generated a different font file for each desired size. These files, in turn, had to be painstakingly downloaded into the printer every time it was turned on. Those bad old days are lo-o-ong gone. Ever since Windows 3.1 was released in 1992, every copy of Windows has come with TrueType fonts. These fonts print out on any printer pretty much the way they look on screen. Still, you can’t print a document without using a font. You’re looking at a font right now. Someone selected it and styled this font, just as you do with your own documents. If the impressions your documents make on other people mean anything to you, learning to use Vista fonts in the best way possible can pay you great dividends. Windows Vista can be very frustrating, however. It includes more fonts than ever before. But there’s no place in Vista to see all those fonts arrayed together, no

Print Font Listing command. And finding out which characters you can insert into your documents means a time-consuming hunt through little-known Control Panel applets. We’re here to give you control over your fonts. You can’t use them unless you know what’s available. In the next few pages, we’ll give you the font guide that Microsoft forgot to provide.

You Can Never Have Enough Glyphs Before we jump into all of the characters and fonts you have available to you under Windows Vista, we need to be clear on a few definitions:

Character: A letter or symbol in a particular language group. The letter a, in Western languages, can be represented as roman, bold, italic, or bold italic, like so: a, a, a, a. All four of these weights are the same character: the letter A.

Glyph: A specific graphical shape of a character. The character A and the character a are different glyphs.

Typeface or face: A collection of characters sharing the same general design. Arial and Times New Roman are different typefaces. All the different weights of a typeface - bold, italic, bold italic, condensed, expanded, and whatever other variations may have been created - considered together are sometimes called a typeface family.

Font: Originally meant one particular size and weight of a typeface. For example, 10 pt. Arial was considered a different font than 12 pt. Arial. Today, however, almost no one uses the word in this manner. In this article, we define font as a computer file that contains a typeface that can be scaled to different sizes.

How Windows Jumped from 224 Glyphs to 652 to 100,000 When Microsoft incorporated TrueType font technology into Windows 3.1, a particular set of 224 characters was present in almost every font that shipped with the operating system. This was known as the Windows ANSI character set. Installed for users in the United States and Western Europe, these characters met most Westerners’ word-processing needs (when used with an appropriate keyboard, for example, U.S., U.K., French, and so forth). These 224 characters, however, were frustrating for most of the rest of the people in the world. Many characters that are essential to write Eastern European languages were missing from the English install of the operating system. And speakers of Asian languages, such as Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, were even more at a loss to use Windows for communication in the languages they were familiar with. Microsoft and other software companies tried to fill this gap with various add-on products. Ultimately, Windows had to expand its character set. Beginning with Windows 95, and continuing with more fervor in Windows 98, Microsoft started including fonts that contained 652 characters. This expanded set of glyphs was called WGL4 - the Windows Glyph List 4. It was considered a PanEuropean character set, because each font contained characters needed by Eastern European, Greek, Turkish, and Cyrillic language groups as well as speakers of Western European languages. Most keyboards still bore the same number of keys. But users of non-Western European languages could purchase localized keyboards and easily configure Windows to use the appropriate character set. Beginning in Windows 2000, and continuing through Windows XP and Windows Vista, Microsoft began to build a much larger character set into Windows. This is known as Unicode, a movement with its own international standards bodies. Unicode was originally conceived to support up to 65,000 glyphs, allowing thousands of Asian ideograms to have their own place in the standard. This set of glyphs is known as the Basic Multilingual Plane or, for short, Plane 0. Even this wasn’t enough - scholars have identified more than 1 million unique glyphs used by all the world’s people at one time or another - so Unicode was expanded to handle an additional 16 planes of 65,000 characters each (Supplementary Planes 1 through 16). Today, 100,000 or so glyphs have places reserved for them in official Unicode documentation, though no font yet exists that is capable of rendering them all.

Making Progress in International Communications An overview of Windows’ evolution in fonts shows a continuous increase in the size of the language groups the operating system can support.

Windows ANSI Windows 3.1’s original character set is called Windows ANSI, although the specification was never formally made a standard by ANSI (the American National Standards Institute). The new 224-character range was an improvement on US-ASCII, a 7-bit code used by older computers, which offered only 96 printable characters out of a possible 128. The first 32 positions were reserved for control codes (such as Tab and Line Feed). Windows ANSI also retains the same 32 control codes, leaving 224 printable characters available out of the 256 that are possible in an 8-bit scheme. Windows ANSI was designed by Microsoft as a superset (some would say an incompatible set) of ISO-8859-1, a specification of the International Standards Organization that ANSI did at one time adopt. ISO-8859-1 reserved 32 positions in the middle of its 8-bit series for control codes (such as CCH, cancel character). Microsoft Windows fonts instead used these positions for printable characters, such as the trademark symbol (TM) and curly quotes. This conflict of character codes still haunts Windows users, as we’ll discuss later in this article. Windows ANSI is also known as Windows-1252 (one of several code pages that are used to define the character encoding used in an HTML document) and Latin-1 (because it includes many of the characters of the Latin or Roman alphabet that’s used in Western countries).

WGL4: Windows Glyph List 4 Windows Glyph List 4, which Microsoft’s fonts began to support in Windows 95 and 98, includes 652 characters. (Around this time, Microsoft also started developing OpenType, which integrates PostScript information into TrueType fonts.) This set incorporates the following code pages, each of which defines a different language grouping:

Latin 1 (code page 1252): Western European languages, such as English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, and many others, plus some languages far from Europe, including Afrikaans and Indonesian.

Latin 2 (1250): Eastern European languages, such as Polish, Czech, Slovenian, Romanian, Hungarian, Slovak, and Albanian.

Greek (1253): The language of Greece, which includes many glyphs that are used today in mathematical formulae by people who don’t speak a word of Greek. These characters are included in Windows’ Symbol font, but this font is being rendered unnecessary by Unicode.

Turkish (1254): The language of Turkey.

Baltic (1257): A character set used in the Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian languages.

Cyrillic (1251): Characters used in Russian, as well as in several other languages, including Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbian, Ukrainian, and others. No one ever bought a 652-character keyboard in order to type all of these languages on the same PC. Instead, Microsoft has always made available a variety of keyboard layouts - software that users can switch among to access the characters of different language groups.

Unicode: One Font to Rule Them All The answer to the confusion over which characters are available in Windows - and whether all Windows users can see those characters when viewing and printing a document prepared by someone using a different PC - is Unicode. This project, which attempts to collect and standardize every character that every language group in the world uses, is a massive effort. According to David McCreedy, who manages the

TravelPhrases.info web site and maintains a huge font list, there are more than 1,100 fonts available that contain at least some multilingual Unicode characters. None of these fonts, however, includes every possible glyph. Lucida Sans Unicode, which has been included in every Microsoft operating system since NT 4 and Windows 95, includes about 1,776 glyphs, surpassing WGL4. Microsoft’s Arial Unicode MS, which is included with Office 2000/XP/2003/2007, comes close to covering the Unicode range with more than 50,000 glyphs, McCreedy says. Meanwhile, these and other fonts seem to add to their character sets every day (as we’ll describe later in this article). How can you use all these characters? Think about it. Perhaps you really should be including a copyright or a trademark symbol in your documents. Hmmm, these characters don’t appear on your keyboard. We’ll show you how to master this challenge and much more.

How to Enter ANSI Characters from the Keyboard article 7-1 shows you all of the characters in the Windows ANSI character set. The characters are numbered 32 through 127 and 0128 through 0255. The numbers above 127, representing characters that don’t appear on a U.S.-style keyboard, required you in previous versions of Windows to enter a leading zero to access them via the numeric keypad. (More on this shortly.) The leading zero is no longer necessary if you’re using the keypad to enter these characters in Vista. The first glyph in each row represents the character you’ll see when an ordinary text font, such as Arial or Times New Roman, is selected. The second glyph is visible if Windows’ Symbol font is selected. The third glyph is from Wingdings, a whimsical dingbats font Microsoft threw into the mix to add some spice to its first rollout of TrueType. If you’re using a version of Windows from Windows 3.1 on up, and it has a Western code page configured, then you have these characters. They aren’t much. U.S. users don’t even see a way on their keyboards to type a symbol for the pound currency (£) or a registered trademark (®). But they’re there, and they do the job if you’re writing a document in a major Western European language. Many useful characters besides letters and numbers are in there, too. And they’re not so hard to use, if you know the secret. We’ll start with the most universal way to access ANSI characters from the keyboard and move on to other methods that are more application-specific.

Alt+Number Works in All Windows Apps Every Windows application that supports TrueType fonts can handle the so-called Alt+number method of entering ANSI characters. This is often cryptically referred to in computer manuals using shorthand such as, “To enter a copyright symbol, type Alt+0169.” Here’s the routine:

1. Make sure your NumLock key is on (NumLock light is lighted).

2. Hold down your Alt key.

3. Type the character number shown in article 7-1 on the numeric keypad. (On laptops, this can be done by turning on the NumLock key, even though the numerals may share alphabetical characters on the keyboard.). In Vista, it’s not necessary to type a leading zero (0) for characters above 127.

4. Release the Alt key. The desired character should instantly appear. Of course, if you’re trying to insert a Wingdings symbol into your document, it won’t look right unless you previously switched the current font in your application to Wingdings. That’s okay, though. You can format the character with your desired font either before or after you enter it. If you don’t know a particular character’s number, and you don’t have article 7-1 handy, you can use Windows’ CharMap utility to visually search for characters. To do this, use the Start menu to run

Charmap.exe. This little applet lets you select any Windows font and scroll through its character set until you see something you want. Make a note of the character’s location so you don’t need to launch CharMap every time.

The “Dead Key” Method Is the Fastest Americans who want to include accented characters and other foreign-language symbols in documents should take advantage of shortcuts that are built into their applications. Microsoft Word for Windows includes a series of “dead keys” for this purpose. These are Ctrl+key combinations you press, followed by an ordinary letter that’s present on every U.S. keyboard. In Word, pressing and releasing Ctrl+’ (Ctrl+Apostrophe) and then pressing the letter e inserts into your document an é with an acute accent, as in résumé. The Ctrl+’ key combination is the “dead key” that turns any vowel you subsequently type into its acute-accent equivalent.

When All Else Fails, Head for the Symbol Menu As a last resort, you can search for and insert most special characters using dialog boxes that are built into many applications. In Microsoft Word 97/2000/2002/2003, for example, you do this by clicking Insert -> Symbol. Word’s Symbol dialog box shows you a scrolling window containing every character in Windows’ Symbol font, or any other font you select. You can also insert special characters from Windows’ middle ANSI character range of characters numbered 128 through 159, such as an em dash ( - ) or trademark sign (™). Watch out for these latter symbols, however. Word, especially older versions, is notorious for its misuse of these characters, as handy as they might be. See the accompanying Secret about the proper way to access 128 through 159.

Characters 128 to 159 Are Bad for You The middle ANSI positions numbered 128 to 159 were reserved by standards bodies years ago for control codes, as explained previously. The symbols that Microsoft put in these positions don’t show up correctly when your document is opened on a Mac or Linux system, or if you paste the text into a Web form or HTML document. Unfortunately, many versions of Microsoft Word automatically convert commonly typed expressions into symbols numbered 128 to 159. Word’s so-called AutoCorrect feature silently turns ordinary ASCII characters such as (tm) and quotation marks into gylphs such as ™ and curly quotes. These characters may not display or print correctly when your document is opened by computer users whose equipment varies from yours. To avoid this problem, make sure the middle ANSI characters are always entered using their decimal or hex Unicode values. A conversion chart for the characters between ANSI 128 and 159 is shown in article 7-3. You must, of course, also select a font that contains these Unicode positions for these characters to display and print. All of Windows’ fonts that support WGL4 do contain these characters in the correct Unicode positions.

If you need to distribute your document, you must save your fonts with the file so they display and print for other computer users. “The document you save could be your own” tip later in this article explains how to do this. If you can’t save the fonts within a file you’re going to distribute, avoid using ANSI characters 128 through 159. Use plain-text ASCII equivalents instead, such as (TM) in regular parentheses and straight quote marks. To make sure this problem never bites you, consider turning off Word’s AutoCorrect feature entirely. In Word 2000/2002/2003, for instance, click Tools -> AutoCorrect and turn off all the check boxes you find in the resulting dialog box.

How to Spell Words Good That heading caught your attention, didn’t it? For a moment, you weren’t sure whether we were joking or just ignorant of proper grammar. We want to make an important point here. Since most English words don’t bear accents, many English speakers mistakenly believe it’s not important to ever use them. Au contraire, mon frère. Try this thought-experiment to see if that assumption is really true. Imagine that you advertise for a new assistant to help you, say, with your chain of ski resorts. Soon, a talented young man applies for the job and seems to have promise. But, for some reason, he insists on preparing documents using a font that omits the dot over every i and j. He sends you letters that look like article 7-4. When you ask about this, he says, “The little marks over the i and j aren’t important, so I don’t use them.” If he persisted in this, you’d never hire him. You couldn’t trust him to represent you and give your company a good reputation in others’ eyes. His work would always look, well, just wrong somehow.

When English speakers run roughshod over accents in, for example, people’s names, the reaction is often just as negative as your disappointment in the brash young man. Not just Old World names, but also many English words - yes, there are some - are properly spelled with accents. It never helps, and it can definitely hurt, if you spell résumé without its accents or drop diacritical marks from names such as Zoë and Chloë. (It’s clear that Chloë’s name, spelled correctly with an accent, rhymes with snowy. If you mangle it as Chloe, you’re suggesting that her name rhymes with crow, which isn’t very flattering.)

Work Around Accents, Don’t Simply Drop Them There are actually some situations in which it’s correct to spell a word or a person’s name without using its accented letter - if you know the secret. In German, for example, it’s considered acceptable spelling to add an e if an umlaut letter is not available on a typewriter or computer keyboard. As an example, the city Düsseldorf, named after the Düssel River, can be spelled Duesseldorf. Ignoring the umlaut over the ü and changing it to u is taken as a sign that the writer is a poorly educated foreigner. Dusseldorf literally translates as “dimwit village” - a bit of an insult to your business acquaintances there. This convention of changing umlaut letters by adding an e to them developed long before computers. Old German buildings, for example, often use OE instead of Ö when words are carved in all capitals on a façade. But the practice came in handy when Europeans began using early IBM mainframes. Only nonaccented characters were available in the ASCII or EBCDIC standards used in those machines, so the conversion became more common. In Hungarian, Turkish, and Scandinavian languages, however, ö is a separate letter of the alphabet. It’s not considered proper to convert ö to oe. (In Swedish, Ö means island, but Oe doesn’t.) It’s a lot easier to simply enter accented characters correctly in the first place rather than learning all these rules.

To help you avoid such faux pas, we’ve shown you in the past few pages how to insert accented characters into your document using even such crippled tools as the U.S.-English keyboard. And we provide article 7-5, which shows the correct spelling for some - but by no means all - words and place names that bear accented characters. But what if you need a character that isn’t on your keyboard - and it isn’t found in the limited Windows ANSI character set. That’s when you turn to WGL4 or, better yet, Unicode.

Unicode: One Font to Rule Them All Unicode, when fully implemented as explained earlier, will ensure that computer users can reliably exchange documents created on different systems. Unicode support is surprisingly strong, even among zealots of such competing platforms as Windows, Macs, and Linux. This makes it only a matter of time before universal, standardized character positions are used by most applications that support fonts.

WGL4 Represents a Temporary Solution, at Best What about WGL4? This set of characters, which supports most language groupings in the Americas and Eastern and Western Europe, is certainly convenient in countries where the use of Windows was previously difficult. But WGL4 was a stopgap measure. Aware of Unicode’s coming ascent, Microsoft encoded all the extra, non-ASCII characters in WGL4 to the positions they would eventually occupy in the Unicode standard. This means you can refer to every upper-level character in WGL4 by using its Unicode number (if the glyph doesn’t appear on your keyboard). Windows users in places like Estonia and Romania have good Windows support for their national languages - and already own keyboards with a variety of European characters printed right on the keytops - thanks to the introduction of WGL4. These languages don’t need a printed chart of these character sets, any more than native speakers of English need an A to Z poster on the wall in front of them. So we’re not including in this article a chart of the WGL4 character set. Instead, we’ve developed for your reading pleasure a listing of major Unicode characters. This includes WGL4 and much, much more. For listings and charts of WGL4 characters, including a breakdown of the language groupings represented within the set, see Microsoft’s “Character sets and code pages” documentation at

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/unicode/cscp.htm. For an excellent table showing the decimal and hex values of characters in the WGL4 range, see

www.alanwood.net/demos/wg14.html. You can use the numerical values in Alan Wood’s table to enter WGL4 characters the same way we’ll soon explain how to enter Unicode values.

The Top 1,000 Characters of All Time Entire articles have been written on Unicode - more like small encyclopedias, actually - filled with every glyph known to humanity, literally. Even some fictional languages, such as Klingon from the Star Trek movies, has entries, although they’re limited to private-use locations and aren’t considered official. It’s impossible for us to duplicate the thousands of pages that have been written to document Unicode. Fortunately, we don’t have to.

If you’re some kind of linguistics scholar, you may feel compelled to know the Unicode assignments of every script from Etruscan to Sumerian. But if you’re someone who just needs to be able to spell that scholar’s name correctly, do we have the characters for you.

Entering Unicode Characters from the Keyboard If you frequently write documents in more than one language, you probably already own a keyboard that supports the characters you need. For example, many Canadians use the French-Canadian keyboard and Windows’ software keyboard layout for it. Both the hardware and the software work together to produce the characters commonly used in both English and French, Canada’s two official languages. You may occasionally find, however, that you need to enter a character from the Unicode range that isn’t on your keyboard. In that case, you have a few options. In Windows 2000, XP, and Vista, Unicode values can be entered from the keyboard using either decimal or hexadecimal numbers. article 7-6 shows decimal numbers without leading zeros, if a leading zero need not be typed in earlier versions of Windows. All hex numbers are shown in article 7-6 as four digits, including leading zeros.

Application Support for Special Characters As knowledge of Unicode becomes more prevalent among Windows users, applications will increasingly provide keyboard shortcuts or menu options to enter extra characters. If your application supports such shortcuts, they’ll be the fastest way to enter such text.

Alt+X Method for Windows XP and Vista Windows XP and higher supports using Alt+X to insert any Unicode character from the keyboard in some (but not all) applications:

1. The status of NumLock doesn’t matter using the Alt+X method.

2. Using the main keyboard, type the hex value of your desired character directly into the visible text of your document. You can type the four-digit hex value or

U+ followed by the four-digit hex value. For example, you could type 03c0 or U+03c0 to specify the Greek letter pi (ð).

3. With your insertion point immediately to the right of the hex value, press Alt+X.

4. The value you typed is immediately transformed into your desired character, if the current font includes that character. You can always change the font at a later time, if you want.

5. Pressing Alt+X again at the same location should change the Unicode character back into its hex-value equivalent. But some applications and fonts don’t support this kind of reversal. So don’t save your document until you know whether or not you can toggle back and forth.

Alt+Number Works for Unicode as well as ANSI If you need to enter just a few special characters, the Alt+number method that was described earlier for ANSI characters also can be used to enter Unicode characters in almost any Windows application. One difference is that Windows Vista supports two Alt+number methods. One uses decimal numbers from 161 and higher. The other uses hexadecimal numbers from 00a1 on up. We’ll first explain the Alt+decimal method.

1. Make sure the NumLock key is on (NumLock light is lighted).

2. Hold down the Alt key.

3. On the numeric keypad, type the decimal number of the character you desire. You don’t need to include a leading zero in front of character numbers 256 and higher.

4. Release the Alt key. If your insertion point is formatted in a font that includes the Unicode character you entered, that character immediately appears. If not, you can change the font at any later time. If the Alt+number method doesn’t work, your input language or code page may be interfering. If so, try the Alt-+Alt-hex method, described in the following section.

Alt+Plus, Alt+Hex Method for Windows 2000, XP, and Vista You may prefer to enter a Unicode character from the keyboard using hexadecimal numbers rather than decimal. If so, there’s what we call an Alt+Plus, Alt+Hex method that works in some applications. It’s a bit more convoluted and time-consuming than the Alt+decimal method.

1. The status of NumLock doesn’t matter using the Alt+Plus, Alt+Hex method.

2. Hold down the Alt key throughout this process.

3. Press the plus sign (+) on the numeric keypad. Nothing will noticeably change.

4. Using the main keyboard, type the letters and digits of the hex code for the character you desire. You can include leading zeros or omit them. For example, typing

03c0 or just

3c0 specifies the Greek letter pi (ð), if your selected font has one.

5. Release the Alt key. If your insertion point is formatted in a font that includes the Unicode character you entered, that character immediately appears. If not, you can change the font at a later time.

Registry Hack May Be Required for Alt+Plus, Alt+Hex The Alt+Plus, Alt+Hex method won’t work in Windows or any application if a certain key in the Registry isn’t set correctly. This could happen if the key was inadvertently changed or was never switched on. If Alt+Plus, Alt+Hex doesn’t work, take the following steps:

1. Use the Start menu to run RegEdit.exe.

2. Expand

HKEY_Current_User to

/Control Panel/Input Method. Find the key (or create a new string value) called EnableHexNumpad. If you create this string value, it should have the REG_SZ type.

3. Right-click and modify

EnableHexNumpad to give it a value of 1. Close RegEdit.

Enter special characters using input locales. An input locale is a software feature of Windows that defines a particular keyboard layout and other localized setting. Once you’ve set up two or more, you can quickly switch from one layout to another so you can, for example, write in different languages using the same keyboard. For more information, see Microsoft’s FAQ on locales and languages at

http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/DrIntl/faqs/locales.mspx#E6E.

Who Has Which Fonts? 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 crucial 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 researching 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 article with the frustrating avalanche-page-of-fonts that’s found in the typical alphabetical listing. Instead, it makes the most sense to understanding 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 article 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. We’ve assembled the lists in this article 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.spinelessarticles.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 presented 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 article, we’re going to catalog those fonts that have been introduced 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.

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

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 billboard- size.

The Fonts Most, But Not All, Users Have article 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 “middle ANSI” set, and it has no weights other than roman.

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.

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 article 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. 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. article 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.

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 article.) 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 characters are mixed on the same line (  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 doggerel phrase: “I drove my Camry to Constantinople.”

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 readable 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 articlelength 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 incarnation, 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 documents, 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 userinterface 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 handwritingimitation 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 additions. But they may look blurry to you on screen because they don’t use black-andwhite 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 deleting 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.

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.

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.

Remember, the figures are derived from people browsing the Web. Servers and other serious 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 articles 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. 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 document. 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 document 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).

Which Fonts Are Web-Safe Fonts? Using only fonts found in Windows 98 and higher may help ensure that most everyone who tries to view or print your document will have the same fonts. But what if you want to save a document in HTML and post it as a Web page? For several years, the Web-development site CodeStyle.org has surveyed computer users to find out which fonts they actually have installed (as opposed to which fonts they should have installed). This Web-based survey asks visitors to look at a specific font sample and compare it to their default browser font. If the two look different, the user clicks a box saying, “Yes, the font is installed.” This kind of survey has all of the problems that are typical of asking people’s opinions (rather than, say, simply spying on them without their knowledge). But it’s a start toward defining a minimum set of TrueType fonts that virtually all web surfers can be assumed to have. We’ve assembled in article 7-14 a list of every font that the CodeStyle.org survey found in mid-2006 was reported to be installed by more than 90 percent of Windows, Mac, or Linux users. The columns show the percentage of each group who say a particular typeface is present on their systems. In the figure, the faces are sorted in descending order of the three columns’ average.

Looking at article 7-14, it’s clear to us that Times New Roman (which is almost universally installed in every version of Windows) is way under reported in the survey. This is probably because many people use it as the default font in their web browsers. They wouldn’t see a difference between CodeStyle.org’s font sample and their default, so they might not report that Times New Roman is installed (although many users would correctly guess that it actually was present).

The Most Web-Safe Font Is Courier (Yuck) Folks, we have a winner! Based on the figures from CodeStyle.org’s web survey, the most web-safe font you can specify on HTML pages is Courier New, with Courier specified as a fallback. (A very similar font that uses the shorter name Courier is more prevalent in Mac and Linux systems than Courier New.) Unfortunately, we can’t recommend that you use Courier or Courier New as the primary text font on a web page you care about - even if Courier was the only typeface on Earth. Courier New is such a lightweight typeface that it’s very hard to read. An old story goes that Microsoft originally got the design by copying an IBM Selectric typewriter ball. But without the spreading of ink that occurred when the metal ball hit a piece of paper, all that was copied was a very thin, spindly set of strokes. It’s probably not true, but it’s a great story. So forget about using Courier for the text of your Web pages. Instead, specify the following web-safe fonts if you need sans-serif, serif, or monospaced fonts. (Remember, HTML allows you to specify a series of font names. Every browser will go through the list, displaying the first font that a user actually has installed.)

Web-Safe Sans-Serif Fonts To specify a sans-serif font for your Web pages in HTML, use the following list, specified in this order:

    Arial
    Helvetica
    Verdana
    Trebuchet MS
  sans-serif

Many people think that all sans-serif fonts look alike. But Verdana and Trebuchet give a web page a sharply different look than do Arial/Helvetica (which are, in fact, very similar). If you want, feel free to specify Verdana or Trebuchet as first in your list. But be sure to look at sample pages using each of these fonts first. You might or might not like the effect of an entire web page set in either of these fonts. In HTML, specifying sans-serif as the last font in the list ensures that a user’s default sansserif font will be used to display your page, if none of your named fonts are installed. You may think that’s unlikely, with fonts that are as widely installed as Arial and Helvetica. But you never know for sure.

Web-Safe Serif Fonts To specify a serif font in HTML, use the following list:

    Times New Roman
    Times
    Georgia
  serif

Again, feel free to specify Georgia as your first choice, if desired. Just test a few sample pages first.

Web-Safe Monospaced Fonts To specify a monospaced font in HTML, which is useful when including a snippet of programming code for your readers to peruse, use the following list:

    Lucida Console
    Courier New
    Courier
  monospace

What?! We’ve gone and broken our own rule of specifying as your first choice the font that’s the most prevalent among all kinds of computer users. That’s because Courier New is so ugly, ugly, ugly, and hard to read. And did we mention that it’s ugly? Lucida Console is a much stronger font, with an even tone that makes fixed-pitch material more pleasant to read. It may not be present on a lot of Mac and Linux users’ machines. But they can fall back to Courier in their browsers and still read the monospaced section of your page just fine. For a list of the number of glyphs present in different Windows fonts, and the language groupings that each font supports, visit David McCreedy’s Gallery of Unicode Fonts at

www.travelphrases.info/gallery/views/all_fonts.html.

Don’t Use the Symbol Font in HTML You may be tempted to specify one of the Windows symbol fonts, such as Symbol or Wingdings, in an HTML document on the Web. Don’t do it. Some people who are putting together a web page say to themselves, “I need to display a symbol for some beta software, so I’ll use the Greek letter beta that’s in the Symbol font.” Then they write something like the following in their code (HTML 4.01 is shown):

<font face=”Symbol”>b</font> This might work in Internet Explorer on a Windows box. But it’s likely not to work in Internet Explorer on the Mac, or in Mozilla, Firefox, Netscape, Opera, or other browsers that support web standards. As likely as not, your page will show a blob or nothing at all where you’ve indicated a “Symbol b.” What you’re saying to standards-based browsers with an HTML line like the preceding one is this: “Give me LATIN SMALL LETTER B and look for it in the font named Symbol, if the user has it.” Unfortunately for you, the Windows Symbol font doesn’t include a shape known as LATIN SMALL LETTER B. That’s why you sometimes get results you don’t like on your page. The Symbol font does include a shape known as GREEK SMALL LETTER BETA. To make browsers display that glyph, which is the Greek beta symbol you want, you should specify it in your HTML code using its decimal Unicode number. In HTML 4.01, that looks like this if your page uses Arial as its text font: <font face=”Arial”>&#946;</font>

The ampersand, hash sign, the number, and the semicolon tell browsers exactly what glyph you want. There are many other ways to specify the same thing and get it to work. But this isn’t a article on coding in HTML, it’s a article on using Vista. Since so many Windows users build their own Web pages, however, we wanted to alert you to this confusing bit of HTML lore. You can look up the decimal number for many Unicode characters in article 7-6 earlier in this article. Or you can check Alan Wood’s detailed Web listings of the Unicode equivalent for every character in Windows’ Symbol font at

www.alanwood.net/demos/

symbol.html. A separate page provides the Unicode positions for many of the dingbats found in Windows’ Wingdings font:

www.alanwood.net/demos/wingdings.html. Every special Wingdings character isn’t represented in Unicode yet, but a lot of them are. You can display these symbolic characters much more reliably in your web pages by specifying a font that includes Unicode’s range of symbols and punctuation. Unicode supports thousands of such symbols - far more than Windows’ Symbol, Wingdings, and Webdings fonts combined. To see charts filled with them, visit the Unicode Consortium’s page on symbols and dingbats,

www.unicode.org/charts/symbols.html.

What Are the Fonts with the Funny Names For? Vista includes dozens of fonts that aren’t mentioned in the previous sections. These fonts have unfamiliar names such as Andalus, Iskoola Pota, KaiTi, and Narksim. These fonts are included in Vista primarily to support language groups other than Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic (in other words, other than Western and Eastern European). For the first time with the release of Vista, users don’t have to select individual language groups when installing the operating system in order to get the fonts needed to render every language that Windows supports. Multilingual support is automatically installed. Unfortunately, this makes for a very long font list in the drop-down boxes of Vista and applications running on Vista. Finding the font you want may be a frustrating exercise in scrolling. The Mac has for years had font suitcase capabilities that allow users to bundle fonts together into frequently used and infrequently used groups. Windows still has nothing like this. Unless you purchase or download a specialized suitcase utility for Windows, you’ll need to scroll down a long set of options whenever you want a particular font. We were, thank heavens, able to obtain from Microsoft a list of which fonts support which language groups (Table 7-3). At least you can look through our list and mentally eliminate those fonts that don’t really fit your desired language group - until Microsoft provides font-suitcase capabilities in Windows.

Many of the fonts that support non-Latin languages do include all of the ASCII characters that you might use in English-language documents - A to Z, 0 to 9, and so forth. But multilingual fonts such as SimSun (a widely used Chinese font) may not give ASCII characters the spacing and look of Latin characters that you’re accustomed to. Don’t select a specialized non-Latin font for your document unless you closely examine the results. Most speakers of European languages will need to use only the fonts listed in the Latin/Greek/Cyrillic and Symbols categories of Table 7-3. Why does Vista need, say, 14 Thai fonts? Just as the Latin alphabet is supported by thousands of different fonts, Windows users in language groups around the world have used many different fonts to create documents. To ensure that these documents will display and print in Vista the same way they did in older versions of Windows, Microsoft must include all of the older fonts.

How to Get the Best Free Fonts Despite all the new fonts included with Windows Vista, you can give your documents a fresh look if you investigate and employ other fonts that are out there that most Vista users don’t have. Unfortunately, if you query a search engine for

free fonts, you’re likely to get a huge list of web sites that have truly horrible products. These include decorative, novelty, and fantasy typefaces that might be useful once in a rare while - a haunted house party, for example - but should never be used in most documents. There’s nothing wrong with novelty fonts, if they’re well done - but most such fonts aren’t. What you should look for, even in free fonts, are typefaces with at least four weights: roman, bold, italic, and bold italic. These fonts should be hinted so they look good on screen and when printed on an ordinary inkjet or laser printer. Avoid fonts that don’t have a full complement of weights or seem to be hasty rip-offs of professional typeface families. There are many good-quality free fonts to be had. If you need to buy commercial, licensed fonts, there are many affordable options for sale (as we explain later in this article).

The 20 Best Free Fonts Vitaly Friedman compiles what is arguably the best list, complete with sample images, of high-quality TrueType and OpenType fonts that are free for the downloading. Friedman’s lists fluctuates over time between about 20 and 25 winners, as he periodically adds new fonts and deletes fonts that turn out to be stolen copies of commercial fonts. It’s fascinating to visit his list every few months and watch the ebb and flow of type designs, which Friedman treats as his personal friends. At this writing, Friedman’s No. 1 font selection is named Delicious, shown in article 7-15. This is a graceful and professionally drawn font by Jos Buivenga of the Netherlands. Delicious has all the attributes you want in a free font (or any font): a full range of weights - even an extrabold, heavy weight - and characters that are well-formed enough to work in small sizes, such as a document’s footnotes.

The font also has the unusual characteristic that a word or sentence is always the same length, whether the roman, bold, or heavy weight is selected (as shown at the bottom of article 7-15). This can be useful if you want to make certain lines of a document bold or nonbold, depending on other variables, without any of the line breaks changing. Friedman’s list of the best free fonts is at www.alvit.de/blog/article/20-best-license-freeofficial-

fonts. Buivenga’s site, which also offers another free sans-serif font named Fontin, is at www.josbuivenga.demon.nl/delicious.html.

Some of the best type design work in the world is done outside the United States. As a result, a few of the sites in the preceding list use languages other than English. These sites, however, are so easy to use - all you really need to do is select a font and click a button to download it - that you should have no trouble whether or not you understand the rest of the text on a site. Identifont, the last site shown in the list, provides a very useful fonts-by-appearance service. If you’re trying to match a font you’ve seen, but you don’t know its name, how can you obtain the font? The answer is to click the fonts by appearance tab at Identifont, specify which characters you have a sample of, and answer a few simple questions. These questions include the shape of the lowercase letters, the thickness of horizontal and vertical strokes, and so forth. The site then displays a few fonts that match your answers. Even if the exact font you want isn’t in the results, one of the alternatives may perfectly fit your needs.

The Best Free Scientific Fonts If you write scientific or mathematical papers, you probably need a specialized font with characters that aren’t natively found in Windows Vista, even with its vast collection of symbols in the Lucida Sans Unicode font. The answer to this problem is STIX Fonts, a project of the nonprofit Scientific and Technical Information Exchange. Organizations that belong to this consortium include the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), the American Institute of Physics, and others that publish scientific journals. STIX Fonts include more than 5,000 glyphs, all of which use the numbering convention established by Unicode. For more information and to download fonts, see

http://stixfonts.org.

The Best Programmer’s Fonts Software developers are wild about monospaced fonts. These are fonts in which every character - even i and w and all of the uppercase letters - are exactly the same width. You might think that proportional fonts - in which i and w are different widths - would be easier for developers to read. But the fixed-width of characters in code can help developers to spot misspelled variables, which may be longer or shorter than expected.

More importantly, developers crave monospaced fonts in which there are distinct differences between characters that look confusingly similar in, say, Arial. This usually means, among other things, that a font designed for use by programmers must add a slash or a dot to the numeral zero (0) to make it clearly different from the letter O. Trevor Lowing, a software engineer and Navy reservist, defines these differences as follows (we paraphrase): Crisp, clear characters Extended character set Good use of white space Easy to distinguish the one (1), the lowercase “el” (l), and the uppercase “eye” (I) Easy to distinguish the zero (0), the lowercase “oh” (o), and the uppercase “oh” (O) Easily distinguished quote marks, apostrophes, and back-quote marks Clear punctuation characters, especially braces {}, parentheses (), and brackets []

Fortunately for programmers everywhere, Lowing has tested numerous monospaced fonts and rates them on his site:

www.lowing.org/fonts.

At this writing, Lowing’s No. 1-rated developer’s font is Bitstream Vera Sans Mono. This is a free monospaced font created by the well-known Bitstream typeface foundry. 7-16 for a sample. For more information, visit

www.gnome.org/fonts.

Another site that rates developers’ fonts is maintained by Keith Devens, a PHP programmer:

http://keithdevens.com/wiki/ProgrammerFonts.

Finally, if you need a font that’s been rated highly on several developers’ lists as clear and legible, and you’re willing to pay a few dollars, get Andalé Mono WGL. (The name is pronounced ON-da-LAY, Spanish for “let’s go!”). The Ascender Font Store offers a five-user license for this font for only $30 USD. See

www.ascenderfonts.com/.

Try the free Windows Vista Consolas font. Before you download a free monospaced font or purchase a commercial one, try the Consolas font family that’s included in Windows Vista. It not only has useful distinguishing features, such as a slash though the zero, but it also has all of the four weights commonly needed in documents: roman, bold, italic, and bold italic. Lucida Console, which is included in every version of Windows since NT 4, is an alternative if you need to share documents with others who may not have Vista’s fonts. (Lucida Console, however, doesn’t make its zero look different from its letter O.)

How to Get the Best Commercial Fonts There’s nothing wrong with paying for fonts. Sometimes, the perfect font isn’t available for free but only in commercial collections. And professional graphic designers, of course, must keep their designs fresh by constantly purchasing the latest typefaces. If you’re not a design professional - you just want access to a broad selection of excellent fonts - then a commercial bundle of high-quality fonts is the answer.

Arguably the best value in commercial fonts today is the Cambridge Collection CD by Bitstream. This disc provides 202 fonts in both TrueType and PostScript formats for only USD$199. That’s less than a dollar per font. And these aren’t useless, novelty fonts, either (although many are headline-style fonts). Most are workhorse text fonts in a full range of weights that work well in business and personal documents of all kinds. For more information, see

www.myfonts.com/products/bitstream/cambridge.

What About a Condensed Font? Windows Vista, and every Windows version in years past, has lacked a good set of condensed fonts. These are fonts that are narrower than typical fonts, which means you can fit more words on a line, in a spreadsheet cell, and so forth. One of the most versatile condensed fonts that Microsoft has ever shipped is named Arial Narrow. This font, which is a rendition of the normal Arial font, but slightly compressed, coordinates well with other sans-serif faces. Used sparingly, only where necessary, a table of figures set in Arial Narrow may look no different to the layperson’s eye than the same table set in Arial (which would be too wide). Unfortunately, Microsoft has never included Arial Narrow in any build of Windows, not even Vista. The font - with a full range of four weights - has shipped only with Microsoft Office. If you have Office installed, and Arial Narrow is one of the fonts available to you, be of good cheer. If not, you may need to purchase it commercially. The best price we’ve found for Arial Narrow is at Fonts.com, a subsidary of Monotype Imaging. Monotype is the foundry responsible for Arial Narrow, so perhaps it makes sense that the best deal on Arial Narrow resides there. Even so, the cost to purchase all four weights in Windows OpenType format is $104 at this writing (see

www.fonts.com/findfonts/detail.asp?pid=243201).

What About Font Utilities? Now that you have all the fonts you need, you may some day want to look inside them, catalog them, and easily pluck characters from them. That’s what font utilities are good for. The following sections list a few of our favorites.

TrueType Viewer Tool The TrueType Viewer Tool is a free utility developed by Rogier van Dalen ( 7-17). It opens TrueType and OpenLayout fonts and reveals everything there is to know about a font. That includes its TrueType instructions, control points, and other technical details. For more information, see

http://home.kabelfoon.nl/~slam/fonts/truetypeviewer.html.

Typograf Among the ranks of commercial font utilities, Typograf has won kudos for its type management skills. Whereas Vista provides no facilities to print sample output of all your installed fonts, Typograf not only prints samples, but it can also find any uninstalled fonts you may happen to have on your hard drives, DVDs, CDs, or other media. The program is available for a 30-day free trial. During this period, watermarks are included on any printouts you make and a dialog box occasionally suggests that you get a paid registration. At this writing, the cost was USD$35. See

www.neuber.com/typograph.

PopChar As a replacement for Windows’ limited CharMap utility, PopChar is a strong contender. The program has a resemblance to CharMap in that you can select special characters from any installed font and insert them into your documents. But PopChar does much more. PopChar remains in your System Tray, waiting for you to click on it. When its window appears, you click the special character you want and it immediately appears in the document you were just working in. No copying and pasting needed with PopChar. The current price is USD$29.99. See

www.ergonis.com/products/popcharwin/.

Summary In this article, we’ve tried to pull the curtain back from the mysteries of the fonts that ship with Windows Vista. Hopefully, you’ll now be able to find and use any specialized characters that your documents may require.