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Review of Microsoft's ClearType Font Collection (2005)

Further, designers don't have to carefully hint the metrics to get good spacing.Both refinements are welcome improvements, but at heart the technology is still much the same as shipped with XP.The new fonts also make strong use of OpenType features such as contextual ligatures, a freedom which has until recently not been available to designers of screen fonts.It's also worth noting what technologies are missing, notably multiple masters (although Luc(as) de Groot designed Calibri as two weights of a Multiple Master, the interpolations aren't shipped), and any kind of optical scaling technology.... You often see a near-horizontal stroke as the top of the lower bowl of the 'g', one of the glyphs most likely to be rendered feebly.In addition to avoiding near-horizontals, several other principles apply to designing for ClearType:* A slightly squarish 'o' renders with better contrast than a perfect oval.* Serifs need to be robust, but a triangular or wedge shape renders just as well as a slab.* Old-style serifs are much worse than modern or transitional (in the latter case, hints need to effectively convert them into modern).At the same time, ClearType does a fantastic job rendering near-vertical stems, including vertical stems with subtle (Optima-like) modulations of weight, so these features are an excellent way to make designs more fluid and less constrained by the oppressive pixel grid of the pre-ClearType world.The new designsMicrosoft commissioned six new fonts from designers working in close collaboration with engineers in their Advanced Reading Technologies group.... For code, the all-important parentheses and braces have exactly the right shape (in Lucida Console, the parens look too much like half-circles, and Consolas also makes the stems of the curly braces exactly vertical, which might not be as aesthetically pleasing, but does help differentiate them visually in code settings).Each of these changes is fairly minor, but add up to a truly great monospaced font.

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