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WOBURN, Mass. & SALFORDS, Surrey, England, Mar. 20, 2007 - Monotype Imaging Inc., a leading global provider of text imaging solutions, has collaborated with Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) to include new and extended fonts with the Microsoft® 2007 Office solution and Windows Vista™ operating system. Among the projects are the design of the Cambria® typeface, the fine-tuning of character shapes to maximize screen readability, the addition of characters to the Windows core fonts and the design and production of East Asian fonts.
“As text plays such an important role within our products, it's essential they incorporate well designed, culturally appropriate fonts that are highly legible and easy to read,” said Julie Bennett, general manager of Windows International at Microsoft. “Our work with Monotype Imaging involved tapping into different areas of the company's expertise, from designing typefaces that look great on screen to producing fonts for various languages.”
The four-font Cambria family, designed by Jelle Bosma of Monotype Imaging, is the new default serif typeface for Office products and is part of the ClearType® Collection of fonts included in the Vista platform. The design was optimized to take advantage of Microsoft's patented ClearType subpixel rendering technology, which involves the manipulation of parts of pixels rather than whole pixels to fine-tune character shapes and spacing for maximizing screen readability.
“In addition to our work with some of the ClearType fonts, the existing Windows core fonts received equal attention from our type designers and typographic engineers,” said Geoff Greve, vice president of font development at Monotype Imaging. Thousands of characters were added to the Arial®, Times New Roman® and Courier New typefaces to comply with the latest release of the Unicode™ Standard, the international industry specification designed to allow text and symbols from the world's writing systems to be consistently represented by computers.
“As these typefaces move forward from previous Windows versions to Vista, it became necessary to expand their character sets to keep pace with the increasing glyph repertoire of the evolving Unicode Standard,” Greve said. “Through our work, the number of glyphs more than doubled in some cases, reaching into the thousands. The Times New Roman Italic design, for example, increased to 2499 glyphs from 640 available previously in Windows® XP,” said Greve.
The development of the Segoe® UI (user interface) typeface family by Monotype Imaging was also a key project. “While document or traditional publishing fonts are one facet of a successful international operating system, user interface fonts are in some ways more important,” said Steve Martin, vice president of engineering at Monotype Imaging. “These fonts are at the heart of a user's interaction with the operating system.” The Office and Windows products both use the new Segoe UI typeface family, a humanist sans serif design developed for on-screen viewing of UI elements at eight, nine and 10 points in size.
“Despite the technical aspects of the projects we handled for Microsoft, design considerations were paramount, such as ensuring consistency between East Asian fonts and the look-and-feel of the Segoe UI design,” Martin said. “The x-height, size, color and baseline of the East Asian fonts – all of which play a role in readability – needed to complement Segoe UI. Part of our objective involved parity with font and weight selection that was consistent from one language to another. In achieving this, true bold weights of East Asian fonts were made available in Vista, allowing for a significantly higher level of display and print quality compared to previous pseudo-emboldening methods used to create bold effects.”
The default Office serif and sans serif Cambria and Calibri® typefaces are available exclusively to printer manufacturers through Monotype Imaging in the company's MicroType® font format. “With these designs poised to define the look of countless documents, e-mails and presentations, OEMs who embed the fonts in their printers stand to offer a substantial compatibility, speed and reliability advantage over their competition,” said Rod Acosta, product marketing manager at Monotype Imaging.
Projects for Windows Vista by Monotype Imaging
About Monotype Imaging
Based in Woburn, Mass. with regional offices in the U.K., Germany (Linotype), Mt. Prospect, Ill., Redwood City, Calif., Boulder, Colo., Japan and China, Monotype Imaging is a global provider of text imaging solutions for manufacturers and developers of consumer electronics devices including laser printers, copiers, mobile phones, digital televisions, set-top boxes, digital cameras and software applications and operating systems. The company also provides print drivers and color imaging technologies to OEMs (original equipment manufacturers). Monotype Imaging technologies are combined with access to more than 9,000 typefaces from the Monotype®, Linotype® and ITC® typeface libraries – home to some of the world’s most widely used designs, including the Times New Roman®, Helvetica® and ITC Franklin Gothic™ typefaces. Fonts are licensed to creative and business professionals through custom font designs, direct sales or e-commerce portals. Monotype Imaging offers fonts and industry-standard solutions that support all of the world’s major languages. Information about the company and its products can be found at
www.monotypeimaging.com
www.fonts.com
www.linotype.com
www.monotypefonts.com
www.customfonts.com
www.fontwise.com
www.itcfonts.com
www.faces.co.uk
Monotype and MicroType are trademarks of Monotype Imaging Inc. registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and may be registered in certain jurisdictions. Fonts.com is a trademark of Monotype Imaging Inc. and may be registered in certain jurisdictions. Arial and Times New Roman are trademarks of The Monotype Corp. registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and may be registered in certain other jurisdictions. ITC is a registered trademark and ITC Franklin Gothic is a trademark of International Typeface Corp which may be registered in certain jurisdictions. Linotype and Helvetica are registered trademarks of Linotype GmbH in the U. S. Patent and Trademark Office and may be registered in certain jurisdictions. Microsoft, Windows, Vista, ClearType, Segoe, Cambria, Calibri, Candara, Microsoft JhengHei, Microsoft YaHei, Malgun, IskoolaPota and DokChampa are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corp. in the U. S. and/or other countries. Unicode is a trademark of Unicode Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. © 2007 Monotype Imaging Inc. All rights reserved.
Vikki Quick
Corporate Communications and PR
Monotype Imaging Inc.
781-970-6115
vikki.quick@monotypeimaging.com
