Microsoft's forgotten monopoly

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Making them isn't the issue

There's plenty of nice looking fonts already out there (I favor the Nimbus family of fonts) which look every bit as nice as the MS fonts most people use on web sites. In fact I have my browser substitute my fonts for theirs, and the pages look just as good 98% of the time, if not better.

The issue really is getting people to USE these fonts. Most people go with the defaults, and Arial, Times New Roman, and Courier are usually those default fonts. Even non-MS programs use those as defaults, so it's not as if this is an MS-led conspiracy. I'm sure these fonts became a defacto standard simply because you are pretty much guaranteed to have these fonts on any modern day system, even the non-MS ones, and they are the least ugly of the ones on every system.

Now like I said I prefer the Nimbus family and will usually change any default to those because those to me are the most clean looking fonts available (Nimbus Sans mops the floor with Arial IMHO), but honestly if you took those away from me I wouldn't bat an eye. Maybe it's just because I'm not a designer, or maybe it's because appearance comes second to functionality in my book, but I don't spend a whole lot of time worrying about fonts. The open fonts are there, and they do well enough for me to get the job done, but closed ones are there too, and they also do well enough for me to get the job done.

Posted by: Michael Kelly   Posted on: 06/19/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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