C the pretty fonts

Way back when IE was a viable option and we were just figuring out this web stuff, Microsoft spit out a collection of fonts that were optimized for screen use. These “core” fonts: Arial, Courier New, Georgia, Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS and Verdana among others, became the de facto standard for web use.

Now, with the release of Vista, MS has introduced six more font families: Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantia and Corbel. These too are fine fonts.

Unfortunately, with the slower than anticipated adoption of Vista the new fonts haven’t yet come into common usage. But they will. In the meantime, the best way to get them installed on your legacy Windows box is to download the latest version of the PowerPoint Viewer. LINUX folks can use cabextract to extract them from the PowerPoint package.

We’ll just assume that anyone doing this has a licensed copy of some MS product that qualifies. If not, feel free to buy the suckers from Ascender Corp.