Mac OS to Lose Georgia and Verdana?

This is indeed very worrying. Almost as bad as the Text Shadow effect now available in Safari, god save us from the average webdeveloper. The web for Panther users may end up looking very weird indeed.

Looks like Apple may need to licence these fonts to maintain usability and readability for most webpages. That or alter the default typefaces for Safari. But change them to what?

More Apple font idiocy. It's like ever since the world rejected GX they've been in sabotage mode.

hhp

Rather than complaining about browsers, install, future of MS on Mac platform, push Apple to launch a new screen fonts program with independent type designers. I'm sure many here will be happy to accept such job. Last time I have heard of something similar was back the system 7 I think?

"Apple font idiocy"? You haven't the slightest clue, have you? Check out the font technology in Mac OS X 10.3. They're EONS ahead of everyone else, and you don't have any idea what you're talking about. QuickDraw GX? What a timely reference, that's only been killed for what -- 10 years already? Wake up and smell the coffee.

The version of Georgia that ships with Panther is a very old (1996) one. It doesn't contain the newer CE and Cyrillic characters found in the XP version of Georgia. FontBook even lists the designer as "Apple Computer." Heh.

You can get the full versions of Georgia, Verdana, Trebuchet and others by buying MS Virtual PC. That's at least twelve expertly hinted fonts for less than $20 a weight, right on par with current big-foundry font pricing.

Also, it's not exactly the easiest solution, but you can always compile CabExtract (since OS X is Unix, after all) and then extract the TTF files from corefonts.sf.net.

Somebody ought to write an AppleScript to take care of this, come to think of it...

Jason, your seemingly blind loyalty to Apple is causing you to:
1) Become overly excitable and antogonistic towards those without such loyalty.
2) Ignore the reality that in the realm of type at least MS makes Apple look rotten.

hhp

Interestingly, I tried to go to Apple.com/typography, to see if there was an equivalent to the MS site, and came up with this, the Apple font developer website. Not updated for Panther yet, but I imagine we'll see that soon.

Well, so far it's not going to be a real problem because most users will not create a custom install and deliberately exclude Explorer, so most will have the MS fonts. The problem will come when Apple will no longer include MS software in future OS X versions.

My guess is that Apple will somehow include some of the default fonts sometime in the future. Even if it is just Arial, Verdana and Georgia.

Oh, by the way. Jason and Hrant, could you keep the OS platform ranting to a minimum. I'm sure most of us here would like to focus more on typography issues no matter which medium they happen to occur on.

Egor, I'm no platform warrior - I think they're both crap. My issue is exactly with type, where there's a discrepancy between the money and effort each platform maker puts up. Apple was so busy getting the right sheen on their titanium lids they forget to implement their own idea (ClearType). And in terms of on-screen type display, Windows is much more flexible.

Apple will not find a way to include the MS core fonts in the future: there's no money in it, and the few users who have a conscious grasp of this stuff can be easily be brainwashed to blame MS for the drop in quality.

hhp

I'm with you JFP, (or competing against you, as the case may be).

Verdana is not the be-all and end-all of screen fonts, in fact it has several serious flaws, such as the cl and rn combinations.

And even if someone were to design the "perfect" screen font, that's only in relation to the state of technology, and culture, which change all the time, and besides, we are in desparate need of a LOT more typographic diversity in the mainstream -- diversity is becoming increasingly marginalized. Be different!

> Be different!

The problems are:
1) It makes HTML more work.
2) I think Apple is instead thinking "Be Cheap!"

BTW:
http://www.theonion.com/onion3507/thinking_different.html

hhp

whats wrong with lucida grande instead of verdana?

Not least that it's not specified in 99% of HTML pages!

hhp

Questions:
1) How many scripts does Lucida Grande support?
2) How well is it hinted?

hhp

For starters, Lucida Grande doesn't ship with italics.

Well, what about the Bitstream Vera family (mentioned a few months ago here) for screen type? They're actually quite beautiful (at least on a Linux Gnome/KDE desktop), well-hinted and there are no potential licensing issues to iron out like there are with cabextracting the MS TTFs.

Hrant, I think the 99% might be even a bit low. Even the recent websites that select the Lucida Grande would have difficulty even reaching a half of a procent.

Although Verdana sucks it's does better than most and it is ubiquitous. Arial maybe even more common. Together they make up what is typography on the web today. Pathetic really, when you think about it.

But what if Safari or Mozilla or the OS could have a substitute list in a preference pane of lets say five typefaces. The default setting could have the MS fonts replaced by something better. It might work. And you could tweak the list to whatever you wanted.

Just a thought.

I'm still waiting for the day when designers can embed fonts into websites ourselves and not have to worry about whether the user has Verdana, Georgia, or Aaux.

Ooh. An addendum to the above comment:

Stuffit Expander 8 can extract CAB files!

This means you can download the fonts from corefonts.sf.net, drag the exe files onto Stuffit Expander, and then copy the TrueType fonts into your /Library/Fonts folder.

And yes, these are the versions with Unicode Latin/Greek/Cyrillic support, too...

>the day when designers can embed fonts into websites

Yeah, but not everybody is so keen.
Many foundries don't even allow embedding of fonts in pdfs.

The problem is (I'm guessing) that the browser software engineers think it's axiomatic that the font has to be on the visitor's hard drive, in order to render a page.

Cheshire -- It's been done. It just sucks and is IE-specific.

Egor -- What about giving a list of fonts, in order of preference in CSS? That's been around for a while and is generally a good way to going about it. Also, using Fontconfig in Linux already allows one to match font names and replace them with other faces. That'd be nice for other OSses to pick a similar feature up.

Jason, a list in CSS is fine but it doesn't solve the problem of sites (99.9% of them) using MS fonts in their CSS. Those sites are not likely going to change their CSS files.

I was hinting at a conditional preference and CSS doesn't provide that for fonts. It would be more like the Fontconfig you mentioned. And Apple might do well to take a look a such a solution. Some users will be able to (re)install the missing MS fonts anyway but it's the masses who will suffer because they never alter there default settings, let alone install a supposedly missing font. Software developers will have to provide these default settings for them.

Embedding fonts would be the best solution, but lets not hold our breath on that happening anytime soon.

All this begs the question, what is Apple's new Verdana? What's the closest equivalent I could specify in my HTML that would look decent on Panther Safari?

Stuart :D

"Well, what about the Bitstream Vera family (mentioned a few months ago here) for screen type?"

I'd love to use Vera. But, well, there's no point until someone figures out how to install it on everyone's machine.

Plus, for some reason, the serif doesn't have an italics.

"What about giving a list of fonts, in order of preference in CSS? That's been around for a while and is generally a good way to going about it."

Sure, but as others have pointed out, the MS Fonts have become ubiquitous, and, as such, most web folks simply spec those, maybe a random other (arial/helvetica) and then the generic groups (sans serif).

It is odd that Apple just didn't license these outright.

"Embedding fonts would be the best solution"

In the hands of competant type folks, but I can see disaster if that ever were to be truly usable. It's bad enough now when I go to a site with comic-sans spec'ed. I can't imagine being subjected to the whims of random authors' favorite fonts.

I'll second Stuarts comment...what are the current equivalents for verdana, georgia, trebuchet and tahoma for Mac users?

Helvetica, Times, Helvetica and Helvetica?
Oh, but at least Courier stays... :-/

hhp

Personally, I specify all serifs in CSS as "Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif". This is mainly because OS X displays Helvetica perfectly -- my subjective experience is that it's far easier to read Helvetica on a Macintosh than Verdana, especially for large blocks of text. I think this is because Verdana -- being designed to be read on badly aliased Windows displays, overcompensates for readability. On OS X, which has the gorgeous Quartz text rendering engine, it loses something. Dunno, maybe it's just me.

And, on Macs at least, Helvetica includes all of the weights and faces and scripts you can think of. Plus it ships with the OS. It *doesn't* ship with WIndows, though, so 99.9% of Windows users will never see my pages displayed in Helvetica. Instead, they see them in Verdana, which I agree is the best serif display font for Windows.

It's too bad about Georgia though -- it's a far superior serif to Times New Roman, which is poor on any OS. And I haven't really seen a decent Mac equivalent.

Perhaps it would be in the best interest of the web community to design a set of well-formed fonts that can be substituted for the MS fonts?

As for the potential ugliness of people being able to embed any font they want, there are already tons of ghastly sites out there. People are going to make ugly things no matter what tools they have at their disposal. The point is that if we have the capability to embed fonts, we can show the web world what websites are capable of looking like. If someone told you that the only fonts you could use in your printed designs were Verdana, Arial, Times New Roman, etc., you'd laugh hysterically. Why do we so willingly accept such limitations on the web, especially now that the standards-compliance folks want us to get away from images as navigation tools?

I was aware of the IE experiment, but since it hadn't yet become a standard, I treated it as a dead issue.

And as for the foundries who don't allow embedding in PDFs, I'm sorry, but I don't see any possible justification for that.

I believe there's a server-side font embedding tool called Fairy that works on all platforms, with all browsers, and supports (most if not) all languages.

"Why do we so willingly accept such limitations on the web, especially now that the standards-compliance folks want us to get away from images as navigation tools?"

Part of it is an acceptance of the technology, part of it is an acceptance of the fact that the web is very much an end-user controlled environment.

"And as for the foundries who don't allow embedding in PDFs, I'm sorry, but I don't see any possible justification for that."

The only justification I can think of is paranoia. And I agree, that ain't much justification ;o)

"I believe there's a server-side font embedding tool called Fairy that works on all platforms, with all browsers"

Hmm...the product appears to be this:
http://www.glyphgate.com/

They say 'all browsers' then state that embedded fonts are supported for NN and IE for Mac and Win and Opera for Win. I'm not sure exactly what it is, but it does require a plug-in on the end-user side which means it isn't really worth the effort.

It looks like they are the same company that worked on WEFT for IE (according to their FAQ).

I find it rather sad to lose antialising in OSX... Quartz is good for larger type, but for text sizes I still prefer aliased Verdana, Gergoria and perhaps Arial at 12px. Verdana is near perfect for aliased text, but I agree it's not the best when it's anti-aliased. I'm slowly getting used to Lucida Grande, which works well under Quartz smoothing, I think. Whoever says Helvetica is good for large amounts of text, I'll have to disagree (it wasn't too bad under System 7, though, at 12px).

I don't think embedding is the way to go. More good, bundled open source fonts would be a good way forward. Fonts that are independent from soft/hardware companies, in the public domain that everyone would be willing to include with their browsers. Possible? Would any of you be willing to embark on a pro-bono project like that, without the finanancial backing of large corporations?

Just some thoughts...

It's just stupid to drop Georgia. Ok, I agree, things evolve, but it's just stupid. They seem to care nothing about consistence among platforms. I think I've never used Verdana. Helvetica is not so ugly on screen. It does a normal job.
Without Georgia we have no more a common serif face for the two worlds (but who actually cares about mac users outside niche communities?)