Tag Archives: typography

Exploring the history and typography of Tahoma and Verdana

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
2

Ask your favorite typophile about the difference between Arial and Helvetica, and you’re sure to regret it… unless you have a latent appreciation for the differences between font faces, the attention given to kerning and hinting, and more. But ask them what’s the difference between Tahoma and Verdana, and you might just be surprised by the ensuing silence. Yet, these are two of the most popular online fonts, and have aged significantly well considering they share corporate roots with Comic Sans and Arial.1 If any fonts ever deserved scrutiny and attention, it’s these two.

Here are two lines of text, one in each of the two fonts in question:

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  1. Just to name two fonts that designers love to hate, though the circle is coming around and you’ll find plenty of Arial defenders too, these days. ↩

CSS & Vista's New Fonts

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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As we reported and reviewed in our article “A Comprehensive Look at Microsoft’s New Fonts”, Vista has some spectacular new fonts – but we have a few issues with them now that we’ve tried them and implemented them with mixed success here on The NeoSmart Files and on the Forums, and here’s the problem.

They just don’t fit. The new fonts are mostly too small to be plugged right in to an existing CSS file. If you tweak the CSS so that it looks right for, say, Calibri; ten minutes later someone that doesn’t have that font is going to come around and ask your server for that CSS file – but since they don’t have Calibri installed, their browser will use the next one on the list, and unfortunately, your sizes are going to be all wrong.

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