[HN Gopher] Microsoft Office's new default font: Aptos
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Microsoft Office's new default font: Aptos
Author : eXpl0it3r
Score : 40 points
Date : 2023-07-13 19:33 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| slavapestov wrote:
| I don't care what anyone says, I'm sticking with Computer Modern.
| acumenical wrote:
| Naming issues and critiques of this new font aside, I'm glad the
| era of Calibri is coming to an end. What a horrible font that
| was, unparalleled in its ability to make any copy look like a
| high school writing assignment. At least Times New Roman had
| class.
| ecf wrote:
| Script typefaces are the only fonts with true class.
| benatkin wrote:
| Seems lazy to name it after a seaside community, and potentially
| harmful by bringing attention to it and causing more sprawl.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| Apple has been naming entire operating systems after real-world
| places since about ten years, do you think anything bad
| happened because of the attention Apple gave to Mavericks or
| Ventura?
| benatkin wrote:
| Probably, at least with Mavericks. Those names also annoy me
| and I wish they'd stop.
| drekipus wrote:
| Harmful?
|
| As a formally harmed person, does that word have any weight or
| meaning anymore?
|
| "Sprawl" from a name of font? Not anything like policies,
| media, immigration etc. No, the name of a font. That's harmful.
|
| Do we need a reality check?
| kristianp wrote:
| > The US State Department only just directed its employees to use
| Calibri for memos earlier this year. The State Department had
| been using Times New Roman instead since 2004. Given it's taken
| them the full 16 years to switch over to Calibri, they'll
| probably be waiting another decade or more to eventually switch
| to Aptos.
| data-ottawa wrote:
| > The US State Department only just directed its employees to use
| Calibri for memos earlier this year. The State Department had
| been using Times New Roman instead since 2004. Given it's taken
| them the full 16 years to switch over to Calibri, they'll
| probably be waiting another decade or more to eventually switch
| to Aptos.
|
| I quite like Times New Roman, it saddens me a little to see it
| looked down on as if it's outdated, and to that end I'm glad they
| commissioned a new font so a well known typeface won't get
| shunned like Times New Roman.
| canucker2016 wrote:
| Fraudsters and digital archaeologists take note. Your docs can be
| dated due to the font used. Now we enter the Aptos era - maybe we
| can date docs like Japanese refer to dates?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_imperial_year
|
| see https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/12/15961354/pakistan-
| calibri... and
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/01/microsofts-fonts-cat...
| canucker2016 wrote:
| Looks like the five new fonts were widely available as early as
| 2021 April 28 - https://www.microsoft.com/en-
| us/microsoft-365/blog/2021/04/2...
|
| though Aptos isn't officially available as Aptos until 2023
| July.
| liminalsunset wrote:
| https://twitter.com/Microsoft/status/1387421368581455874 These
| are the five candidates that it seems like the font was picked
| from, of which Bierstadt appears to have been chosed and renamed
| to Aptos. On the surface the new default font looks a little like
| Public Sans to me.
|
| Tenorite seems to look like some form of a Gotham ish one,
| Grandview is some form of DIN it seems.
|
| Here's an example of the five fonts, Bierstadt, Skeena, Seaford,
| Grandview, and Tenorite. https://imgur.io/gallery/Dx91rtr
| Krasnol wrote:
| They probably decided that fewer people know the painter than
| would make fun of Beer City.
| tda wrote:
| Thanks! Grandview is horrible. Bierstadt is ok but I would have
| preferred Skeena.
| aydio wrote:
| Looks good. Hopefully they'll update their Fluent UI libraries in
| a timely fashion to include the font as we've been in the process
| of redesigning our Office add-in.
| velcrovan wrote:
| Maybe if they gave a shit about typography they would fix the bug
| in Word that prevents it from embedding more than one style of a
| given font:
|
| > Perhaps most infuriating, Word will embed any number of styles
| per family, but it will only display one. Meaning, if you're
| using regular, italic, bold, and bold italic in your document,
| all four styles will be embedded. But when your recipient opens
| the file, only the regular will display correctly; the italic,
| bold, and bold italic will be Word-synthesized approximations,
| not the embedded fonts.
|
| > This last limitation means that Microsoft Word has reached the
| exalted state where it is not compatible with itself: it is
| writing data into its file format that it cannot read. Worst of
| all, this is not a bug--it's the intended behavior [2].
|
| [1] -- https://practicaltypography.com/how-to-embed-fonts-in-a-
| word...
|
| [2] -- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-
| us/openspecs/office_standards...
| darreninthenet wrote:
| Is there a decent word processor that does handle this
| correctly?
| anon373839 wrote:
| Apple Pages. It also renders fonts much, much better - the
| difference in kerning quality is night and day.
| Unfortunately, Pages just doesn't provide a lot of
| flexibility and power for formatting the document. It's more
| like Google Docs - suitable for high school book reports.
| moritzwarhier wrote:
| This is indeed surprising. CSS to the opposite handles this
| correctly and allows fine-grained control.
|
| The synthetic substitutions still exist, but only if you fail
| to provide the font variants.
|
| If I'm not mistaken, browsers still allow using embedded font
| variants if they are available in e.g. one OTF file
| randomluck040 wrote:
| Wait, what? What would be the advantage of this? There must be
| a reason why this is done like that?
| outside1234 wrote:
| I live in Aptos, California (which the font it named after) :)
| [deleted]
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(page generated 2023-07-13 23:02 UTC)