Besides Windows Classic, another popular question when a new version of Windows is announced is whether or not the “Add Fonts” dialog is there. In fact this is such a quirk it’s the first and one of the top problems on Aero Taskforce. Well, I’m both glad and proud to say that the “Add Fonts” dialog is no longer there. In addition, there are also a number of font management improvements in Windows 7 worth mentioning.
As you see from above, the fonts folder now actually previews font live from the thumbnails. Each font’s thumbnail has 3 characters of it’s alphabet displayed on the icon. This is a great way to quickly glance through the styles of fonts available without resorting to furiously scrolling through Photoshop.
Fonts in a combined set will also no longer take up five different slots, instead, appearing as one font (for example Calibri) which you can double click to dive into.
Windows 7 is also intelligent about toggling off and on fonts when required. By “hiding” fonts, they are still technically installed in your OS but not enabled to applications, this reduces the number of fonts to scroll through and also memory. First, Windows 7 will automatically hide fonts based on regional settings, but it will also allow you to show and hide them manually.
There’s also a new font in the pre-beta build of Windows 7. It’s called Gabriola and it’s a beautiful script font with support for a wide variety of advanced OpenType functionalities.
Technologically, with the introduction of DirectWrite there is also better support for text rendering in terms of non-pixel-bound fonts and YDirection antialiasing.
Will somebody at PDC put this up for download quickly before A-Team kills it?
You would be right Direct Write will pretty much end up solving all rendering issues there were left in the transition to vista. Gabriola is really cool font indeed. I think Aero Taskforce will be a perfect way to reference things in Windows 7.
Does anyone know when we’ll be able to apply for the beta program.
I really hope Office 14 will support advanced OpenType features. Any word on that?
What happens when you double-click/open a specific font? Does it just open the same window as before?
Hiding fonts is a dream come true. As a designer, all that useless clutter of system fonts in Vista drives me nuts, and you can’t delete them. This is a great solution. I’d upgrade to Seven just for that.
And just wondering, why not a Font Library? Font libraries can take up a lot of disk space, plus it would be cool to be able to plug in a USB memory stick with fonts on it, and have those automatically be read. Public computers can then default their font library to include the root directory of the memory stick, so that people can use their own fonts.
Ummmm…. how would two of those crazy Ls look side by side? Would the ‘loopiness’ just overlap? i.e. if I wrote “Lollies” would I get overlapping Ls?
Nice job Windows 7 team. I think they really are responding to user’s feedback. And to themselves as well.
Next question: does the clock.avi still exist?
I hope they get rid of this ridiculously ugly bar (the one with “organize”) in fonts. it’s also in add/remove programmes). why cant they put the main bar across a la explorer?
Still, i’m happy they are finally addressing the font stuff. It’s great – and i wouldnt be suprised if your taskforces hasnt been highly useful for them!
The blog entry linked with ‘DirectWrite’ is extremely interesting – the new Direct2D api looks good. It would look great if they were able to backport it to XP, but I doubt this is going to happen.
Hm still has the typical problems with Windows design:
http://www.istartedsomething.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/w7fonts3.j pg
Why have they put Advanced options with just one tickbox below it? Why not just put that tickbox below the tickbox in the area above?
Perhaps they’ll add more advanced options, but I doubt it. Its just typical windows design though…eugh
The rest: THUMBS UP
“Features removed from Windows Vista and Windows 7?:”
It is not possible to list fonts by similarity based on PANOSE information or hide font variations such as Bold, Italic etc (which was possible since Windows 98) in the Fonts folder. I hate such needless random removals and I WANT THEM BACK!!!!! GRRRRRR!!!
They seem to be looking at your Aero Taskforce…
Word 14 *has* to support advanced OpenType features. There’s not a single word processor on Windows that supports this and Microsoft dominates word processors and doesn’t add crucial features. No wonder they’re blamed for “hampering progress”.
I’ve been wanting these features since the last century
> Features removed from Windows Vista and Windows 7
Panose classification was cut as very few fonts set the Panose values correctly.
> They seem to be looking at your Aero Taskforce…
Absolutely! Everyone at Microsoft thought the font handling was perfect until Long highlighted the issues.
> how would two of those crazy Ls look side by side?
The contextual OpenType features are coded to avoid such collisions.
Cheers, Si
Since there is DirectWrite, does it mean that tablets running Windows 7 would finally have decent anti-aliased text when they are in portrait mode? Currently Cleartype produces a lot of artifacts due to the subpixels being horizontal in rotated mode rather than the vertical orientation that Windows Vista expects.
@redfish:
Regarding the font library, I think it’s a rather good idea to let non-admin users use their own fonts! I don’t really agree with the implementation though. Windows currently “temporarily registers” the font when you open the Font Preview dialog, and while the dialog is open, if you reopen your programs, you find that you can use the font. I’d suggest a cleaner interface to allow users to “temporarily register” fonts (at least, when you want to use 10 fonts, you don’t have to open 10 windows), or allow non-admin users to install fonts to their own user folder.
>>It is not possible to list fonts by similarity based on PANOSE information or hide font variations such as Bold, Italic etc
As Si mentioned, the PANOSE feature wasn’t well supported. As for hiding style variants, Long shows above how the default view collapses families into a single tile.
(Hmmm… I don’t see Arial Black as a separate tile in that screenshot. Removed from Windows, or merged into the Arial family?)
Never mind my first comment; I just loaded Windows 7.
It seems that, in Word 12 running on Windows 7 M3, if you enable paragraph marks and other hidden formatting symbols (Ctrl + *), Word will use OpenType ligatures (‘fi’, ‘ff’, etc). I’ve tried this with Calibri and Adobe Garamond Pro.
It’s not perfectly consistent. It seems to depend on the order that you type things (eg, whether you type a space after the word in which the ligature should appear or hit enter). It should work if you open Word, create a new blank document, press Ctrl + *, and type ‘Test: fi’.
Is the hide font feature operational?? I am beta testing Windows 7 and the hidden fonts still appear on Word 2007’s font list. (Deep sigh). I love the concept, but wonder why it doesn’t appear to be working. Is this a feature that won’t be implemented until the next version of Office?
Word provides its own font dialog. Even though fonts are hidden, all the fonts are still installed, and Word is getting a list of all installed fonts. Any app that uses the font common dialog or the new Ribbon controls (as in Wordpad or Paint) will pay attention to which fonts are hidden; hopefully Word will do so in a (not too) future version.
Thank you, Peter, for your informative reply. I’ll keep my fingers crossed and hope that the next version of Word takes advantage of the ability to hide fonts. (Man, that Peter is some kind of a genius!)
Not a genius; just a MS program manager who knows a bit about the font-management features.
The font rendering, or sub pixel rendering whatever, is a PAIN IN THE ASS in Windows 7, my eyes a sore!!!
Hello,
Weird, but when I write with Gabriola font, it seems quite a regular font to me – it doesn’t have those nice calligraphic lines.
Why?
@Radu
Agree completely! The font rendering gives me a splitting headache. I miss XP style fonts!
The default fonts under windows 7 is really ugly in simplified chinese, I just installed windows 7, and now I want come back to my windows xp.
I would like to use 宋体, pls set it as default if windows 7 in simplified chinese mode.
font smoothing sucks
simsun.ttc sucks, simsun.ttf of windowsXP is much better. I wanna delete that ugly font, but system doesn’t let me do it.
Windows 7 font issue. I have a bunch of Alberta fonts of different varieties. When I open the font group there are only 3 displayed. If I delete those 3, 3 new ones appear. If I add new fonts of the same type to the group, it says they are already installed even though they do not show in the folder, and when I say reinstall they show for a few seconds and then go away??? I’m not sure they are there or not, I can’t use them in any applications, but they are already installed?
Hi. I’m a MS program manager and worked on this area in Windows 7.
This sounds like it may be an instance of an issue we’ve had reported by one font vendor: there are some not-so-common situations in which a font developer doesn’t create the name strings for fonts correctly, and the symptom that results is that the font UI elements (font-picker common dialog, Fonts control panel) as they interact with GDI get confused about how many font families there are, and what all the styles are. Apps that interact directly with GDI to get a list of fonts and create their own font-picker dialog (e.g. MS Office, Adobe Photoshop) should not be impacted: all the fonts should still be listed there even though they don’t appear in the Fonts CPL. If it’s that issue, I wouldn’t expect a typical user would encounter many fonts with this issue.
Hope that helps.
Thanks for the post peter. Should I get a new Alberta font? if so do you recomend a source? Can I edit the Name String correctly and how do I do that? This happens with lots of fonts on our server. I am working in Indesign and the fonts that are available are the same that show in the font folder.