 | By Woody Leonhard Microsoft introduced a slew of new fonts with Windows Vista and uses one of them, Calibri, as the default font throughout much of Office 2007. So, if someone sends you a document, and it doesn’t look quite right in XP, you probably need one or more Vista fonts — and I’ll show you a perfectly legal way to get them absolutely free. |
Why Vista’s new fonts are really worth getting
We can argue all night about the good, the bad, and the ugly of Windows Vista. But few people fault Vista’s new ClearType fonts. They clearly (ahem) outperform Windows’ old workhorse fonts that we’ve all come to know and revile: Arial and Times New Roman.
Windows Vista brings six brand-new fonts to our screens and printers. Included are three sans-serif fonts (Calibri, Candara, and Corbel), a pair of serif fonts (Cambria and Constantia), and one monospaced font (Consolas).
Designed from the ground up to improve on-screen legibility, all six TrueType fonts render well on any printer and scale well to any size:
- everything from small legal disclaimers to SCREAMING HEADLINES
The new fonts are the default in Office 2007
The folks at Microsoft like the new typefaces so much that Office 2007 uses these fonts widely. For example, unless you change things, new Word 2007 documents and new Excel 2007 spreadsheets are formatted in 11 pt. Calibri, PowerPoint 2007 presentations start out with 44 pt. Calibri as headings, etc.
These documents look good as long as you always work in Office 2007, whether you’re running it on Vista or XP. But viewing or printing such documents in Office 2003, XP, or older versions can cause an extreme loss of, uh, face.
Here’s why you may suffer from font weirdness
Let’s say you create a PowerPoint presentation using Office 2007. PowerPoint dutifully and automatically adjusts the text on every slide to use the Calibri font. Slick.
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