Cleartype Team - Typography in Windows Vista

I bow down to the Legend that is Bill Hill.

it really is amazing technology

Bill 'll ken fe next teime then wanne

Samuel, UK

Why am i streaming only 40kbit video..  I have the bandwidth.. Im downloading the file at a steady 7mbit/sec..

On a side note, when will we see a bitrate jump, to say, 500kbit?

dawks, you're seeing what us mac users see when we try to stream wmv with wmp-osx.  Might be best to download it instead.

And for what it is worth I think Bill is wrong (big statement I know) about type on mac.  Maybe he someone might show him an OSX box so he can provide a more up to date opinion?

Man I want to thank this guy for the clear type tuner. Best damn windows xp add on.

What was the book he was reading on the Roman empire on his PPC? I want to check it out, I too am interested in history like that.

EDIT: I can't freaking emphasize how much the clear type tuner works.

Rossj wrote:

And for what it is worth I think Bill is wrong (big statement I know) about type on mac.  Maybe he someone might show him an OSX box so he can provide a more up to date opinion?

so i've read a little about AAT (Apple Advanced Type) and i don't see how it is anything close to what cleartype does for you.

http://developer.apple.com/fonts/TTRefMan/RM06/Chap6AATIntro.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Advanced_Typography 

i turned off anti-aliasing on a mac at school:
sudo defaults write CoreGraphics CGFontDisableAntialiasing YES

the text looks horrible with it off. so perhaps it is just the anti-aliasing that makes their text look good on the screen after all.

Fascinating video. Two questions come to mind:

(1) Will the ClearType Tuner be integrated into Vista? There are a lot of complaints and unfavorable comparisons on the Internet made by people who haven't experienced ClearType optimized for their vision. Having the wizard there out-of-the-box would be a great boon for these people as well as the average customer who doesn't even know the tuner exists.

(2) To what extent, if any, was this team involved in the design of the Segue UI font that's the new default interface font in Vista? I'd be interested to hear what qualities make a fontface ideal for an interface as opposed to long streams of content and vice versa.

Thanks.

I might be missing something (I only watched half the video so far) but cleartype just looks like it is doing anti-aliasing as well? And Windows without anti-aslising is also pretty average.*

Don't get me wrong, I am open to the possibility that reading documents on XP is gentler on the eyes than reading documents on OSX (for some people) - but for me I find reading on my mac a lot easier.

The comment in the video about macs 'blurring' the type was a bit silly when followed 5 minutes later by a presentation of the cleartype aliasing.  Don't get me wrong cleartype is pretty good and I rely on it to make Windows usable for me when reading large docs.

Even other maccies think that cleartype is superior (in some aspects). On a related note, is there a fontbook type app for Windows ?



* Yes I realise it is sub-pixel rendering (which is great if you're on an LCD).

Rossj wrote:

I might be missing something (I only watched half the video so far) but cleartype just looks like it is doing anti-aliasing as well? And Windows without anti-aslising is also pretty average.*

Don't get me wrong, I am open to the possibility that reading documents on XP is gentler on the eyes than reading documents on OSX (for some people) - but for me I find reading on my mac a lot easier.

The comment in the video about macs 'blurring' the type was a bit silly when followed 5 minutes later by a presentation of the cleartype aliasing.  Don't get me wrong cleartype is pretty good and I rely on it to make Windows usable for me when reading large docs.

Even other maccies think that cleartype is superior (in some aspects). On a related note, is there a fontbook type app for Windows ?



* Yes I realise it is sub-pixel rendering (which is great if you're on an LCD).

ClearType is not "just" antialiasing. Watch the whole video. Do you see how ClearType uses color? That's not anti-aliasing and why it's better than the Mac's anti-aliasing scheme.

Also, you missed his whole point. Apple tries to make its fonts be faithful to print fonts. Microsoft tries to make its fonts readable on screen.

We have a lot of Macs at Microsoft and know its OS well. Fonts on Windows (when comparing properly tuned systems on both sides) are much more readable and sharper. At least to my eye. But, I'm biased.

Rossj wrote:

dawks, you're seeing what us mac users see when we try to stream wmv with wmp-osx.  Might be best to download it instead.

And for what it is worth I think Bill is wrong (big statement I know) about type on mac.  Maybe he someone might show him an OSX box so he can provide a more up to date opinion?

Have you really compared type on both systems? My brother-in-law works at Apple and even he admits type is better on Windows. The problem is that the rest of the OS looks better on Macs, so many people often confuse the UI overall with the readability of the type.

And, Bill knows Macs very well, which should be apparent in the video.

Khamul wrote:

On top of this, is an hours footage on fonts really necessary. Well I wouldn't know, would I?

Sorry about this. I get requests for shorter videos all the time, but in that hour you're talking with about 60 years-worth of expertise built up. Yes, it needs an hour to cover in any depth. I would have gone longer if I hadn't run out of tape. Kevin and I talked afterward about the research he, and others, are doing into aesthetics and how that affects the usability of products and it's really interesting stuff.

definitly didn't mind the length. quite informing, she seemed really shy but cute none the less. after rediscovering the cleartype tuner about a week ago i am quite quite impressed.

if size is a problem what about splitting the vids up in chunks?

ploe wrote:

if size is a problem what about splitting the vids up in chunks?

Splitting vids up makes them much harder to produce -- I'm evaluating doing that, though, cause lots of people want me to do shorter vids. That's why we developed the clip technology so people can tell you what the cool part of the video is.

You can't go wrong when  you have interesting people like that to interview.

Bill Hill is still the best C9 guest ever.

dentaku wrote:

You can't go wrong when  you have interesting people like that to interview.

Bill Hill is still the best C9 guest ever.

speaking of bills...are we going to see a vid from the other bill again some time soon? (i know he's probably busy)

ploe wrote:

speaking of bills...are we going to see a vid from the other bill again some time soon? (i know he's probably busy)

Hopefully soon. Gotta work on that. He's really hard to schedule.

I forgot to link to the Fontblog: http://blogs.msdn.com/fontblog/

There's a lot of good info there!

Khamul wrote:

Very Late Edit: I just realised I have all those fonts. Where on earth did I get them from I wonder? Anyone know why on Earth I have Calibri, Consolas, Cambria, Candara, Constantia and Corbel.

These are the Office '12' document fonts:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2005/12/07/501009.aspx

scobleizer wrote:

ClearType is not "just" antialiasing. Watch the whole video. Do you see how ClearType uses color? That's not anti-aliasing and why it's better than the Mac's anti-aliasing scheme.

I know it is sub-pixel rendering which allows them to use the three colours in any pixel to fool your eyes into seeing the end result.

Apple knows about sub-pixel rendering (Woz believes he was using it a long time ago), unfortunately an existing patent at Microsoft means they would have to licence it and I do not believe it is clear to them that they have permission to use it after Microsoft's investment in them.

I did make the point that it was my opinion, maybe my eyes are just screwed?  I've seen cleartype at work, as you know I work on both macs and windows every day, and it is certainly crisper, but my point was that this doesn't necessarily make it easier for *everyone* to read.  I'm not dissing cleartype, I was just questioning the comment that it is the best way for everyone to read on-screen.

scobleizer wrote:

Also, you missed his whole point. Apple tries to make its fonts be faithful to print fonts. Microsoft tries to make its fonts readable on screen.

I didn't miss that, and I understand the point .. I like wasting paper as little as the next person, but *currently* on Windows I tend to print out word docs more than I print out docs on my mac.  I admit one out of a cast of millions is not a very good metric

scobleizer wrote:

We have a lot of Macs at Microsoft and know its OS well

At least the Office team do - WMP on OSX is a *mess*. I pause a video and then press play and have to resize the window to see the video change - from the local disk - WTF?!? And about another dozen silly 'features'.  But I don't want to turn this into an OSX rant.

Overall I take the point that cleartype is much better technology than AAT, I just think that blanket statements about more readable than other  OS is a bit silly given the difference in everybodies vision.

How does ClearType solve the issue of lack of horizontal resolution?  I will get around to watching the last 30 minutes of the video .. so just tell me to stfu if it is explained further on.

I've gotta show this video to my parents.

They've been running a Japanese magazine here in Vancouver since about 1991, and my dad worked as a designer before that so he'll love all this stuff.

Hope he can comprehend Bill's English though... awesome accent

By the way I was playing with text in XamlPad on XPSP2 and Japanese looked really pretty... am I just imagining things or is some of this stuff already being applied in the WinFX CTP?

Rossj wrote:

Apple knows about sub-pixel rendering (Woz believes he was using it a long time ago), unfortunately an existing patent at Microsoft means they would have to licence it and I do not believe it is clear to them that they have permission to use it after Microsoft's investment in them.

Bill Hill told me separately that Apple actually does license at least some of the rendering technology in ClearType. We regularly do trades of technologies this way. That's a good reason why he knows how they've implemented it. The Apple folks will tell you their fonts more accurately represent what'll get printed. Both views are right, you gotta decide which one is more important for you. Readability or faithfulness to printouts.

The first time the phone rang, and a nearby lackey picked it up and hung it up, was that a Scoble Snicker I heard?

Scoble Snickers:  The official candy of Microsoft Christmas.

would help to have a little portable mike - nothing too fancy, but it's difficult to hear a lot from everyone else besides the camera man

great videos though!

EqualLogic Brian wrote:

would help to have a little portable mike - nothing too fancy, but it's difficult to hear a lot from everyone else besides the camera man

great videos though!

'

Hmm, the problem with portable mikes is that they need to be handed off and ruin spontanaiety. I can hear these videos just fine, though. What kind of speakers/audio card do you have? I've tested this on a variety of systems and even using the cheap built-in speakers on my Toshiba Tablet PC I can hear everyone just fine.

SlackmasterK wrote:

The first time the phone rang, and a nearby lackey picked it up and hung it up, was that a Scoble Snicker I heard?

Scoble Snickers:  The official candy of Microsoft Christmas.

Yeah, I thought it was funny that we were being interrupted and that we just hung up on the poor caller.

scobleizer wrote:

Yeah, I thought it was funny that we were being interrupted and that we just hung up on the poor caller.

I thought as much.  I found it amusing and laughed at the same time; had to rewind a few seconds to listen again, just to verify. Great minds think alike!

As interesting as the discussion of how different mediums influence the aesthetics of typefaces; I'm interested in the idea of a font that looks good both in print and on screen. From what I've tried the best example of this is Frutiger Linotype. I'm wondering what the typography thinks along this line, and how to design typefaces to meet this type of standard.

I'm also wondering what people think of the font by Emgire, Filosofia. Its not my favorite font for print or on screen text, but its my favorite serif font for design purposes.

Don't worry about the length. Channel9 has a very wide audience. Some people really enjoy things that others find very boring. Keep up the great work

http://www.macobserver.com/images/columns/devilsadvocate/2003/20030523quartz/WordScreenGrab002.gif

I find that to be a pretty interesting comparison shot. Until seeing that, I thought I liked cleartype more. Apple's solution does just seem easier to read, though.

http://www.macobserver.com/images/columns/devilsadvocate/2003/20030523quartz/Fig2.jpg  http://www.macobserver.com/columns/devilsadvocate/2003/20030523.shtml (scroll down a ways to the six close-up shots)

But this, hands-down, shows Cleartype's technical superiority. Oh, the hinting.

ClearType looks crisper on my monitor... Quartz looks blurry.

Khamul wrote:

PS: Why do they all start with C?

Bill Hill answers this in the video: It's because they're all fonts designed for ClearType, so they started the names of all the fonts with C to go along with that.

(deleted -- apparently making quote blocks doesn't work right if one uses Safari on C9)

Here's another (better?) comparison between ClearType (top) and Mac (bottom):

---------------

What did the Romans ever do for Queen Boudica? Why would Tolkein "waste" years of his life creating a fantastic pre-Roman past? The word fascism comes from Rome---not because they discovered something foreign and had to find a name for it---no fascism is something Romans knew for themselves.

Many Chinese websites I have tried, it was apparent that ClearType(明瞭字体) doesn't work.
In my option, TrueType(真字体) is more comfortable to my eyes, but I don't know is the ClearType better than TrueType for my eyes? I mean less 'harmful' than TrueType.
The video showed us a good air-condition at first, it's funny, I almost think the video made in months ago , or there are tons of freak guys worked in MS, you know, freak guys always can make some unimaginable and cool stuffs.

You would not think an hour of talk on fonts could be made so interesting, but yes it is.

Some beautiful font designs, especially the Japanese characters. Computer font design was not something I had really considered, but it plays a crucial and unsung part in your whole Human to computer interface experience and so on your productivity and enjoyment.

Bill said something like current monitors do not yet have a high enough resolution for great font rendering. Current monitors (e.g. my laptop 1280*768) are a roughly similar resolution to the new High definition (HD) TV resolutions, so are we eventually going to see mega high resolution TV/monitors s one day ?  6000 pixels width and above ?  How high a resolution do you need to go to before an extra DPI becomes redundant for the human eye?

I once saw a green CRT display with terrible fonts, how things change.

Bill Hill should have his own documentary series. More Bill Hill please.

 

 

 

Great video, but doesn't this kind of break the "No Powerpoint in C9!" rule?

LightRider wrote:

Great video, but doesn't this kind of break the "No Powerpoint in C9!" rule?

I guess it does, but it doesn't bother me. Now, if they did a presentation rather than had a conversation? Then I would have gone ballistic.

美留丘さま！明瞭字体！万歳！
Bill Hill! Clear Type! Hooray! (UTF-8)

Maybe they've got something up their sleeves with the Metro format?

One of my longstanding wishes was for Microsoft to offer something competitive with LaTeX.  The few things that make LaTeX continue to exist, in my opinion, is 1. separation of content and layout (which is sometimes a good thing and sometimes not).  2. Better support for references and citation.  and 3. Better typography.

Any thoughts on the typographical advantages of LaTeX versus the future directions on Cleartype, etc?

How about mathematical typesetting?  You can make crudely drawn equations in Microsoft Equation Editor 3.0, but it doesn't cut it for more formal publications.

The current Microsoft offering here is rather poor, and its unfortunate because it forces a lot of Microsoft enthusiast like me to write documents in LaTeX, a painful process.

Brian

I'm glad to see that you took my request to heart to stop making nervous jokes and laughing obnoxiously when Bill Hill is trying to talk -- oh wait, no you haven't.

He's still amazing.

I just wanted to say that comparing the different font renderings is very hard because there are so many variables, biggest are perhaps LCD panel, font rendering settings, personal preferences and how a person sees colours. And because of the variables a screenshot does not always tell the truth, type that is perfect on my panel and in my eyes can be awful to someone else or using another panel.

The examples given in comments were quite poor: the Word screenshot was from 10.1 or 10.2 and the rendering was improved noticeably since then. The other screenshot had completely different settings on OS X (no sub-pixel antialiasing and the small fonts were rendered completely unaliased) than ClearType.

Having said that, I must say that I personally do prefer ClearType rendering, if and only if it is well tweaked with the ClearType tuner. Otherwise the results do vary a lot. For example at my university's PC lab ClearType fonts on XP are worthless given the settings work poorly not with their monitors and users can't run ClearType tuner at all because of security reasons, not great.. On the other hand on my friend's laptop ClearType looked ok before and great after tuning.

Bill Hill is a great character and it is always a pleasure to see and listen to him. Also more content about fonts and typography is always welcome.

I'm sorry to take this up, but could it be possible to provide the content in some more standard format (e.g. DivX, XviD, mpeg-4, h264) than WMV? AFAIK there is no player for Linux and the existing Mac player is next to unusable, definitely not Microsoft's finest hour. But yeah, I guess you probably don't have much of  a choice but to use WMV

Bill & team ... )))

I'm convinced now to turn on ClearType for the laptops I have to set up before they ask for it. 7% productivity! But somebody buy Scoble an extra battery and some more tape! This is about the second video I've watched where the battery cuts off the show. More long videos please. Ignore the people asking for shorter video.

iStation wrote:

美留丘さま！明瞭字体！万歳！
Bill Hill! Clear Type! Hooray! (UTF-8)

As I know, most of Chinese NEW words are come from Japan, especially in western computer term area, such as 字体(font), 記憶体(memory), 情报(information)...
さまis more like KuangCao, one of 草書(grass script), an example of Grass (caoshu) Script.

情报:

When Chinese write characters, they may write quickly so that the strokes run together. This is called Cursive Chinese XingShu  行書running script Chinese over the years have devised a number of very cursive forms called Super Cursive CaoShu  草書grass script. The word grass refers to the fact that it resembles flowing grass. The earliest forms date back to 200 BC and is called ZhangCao 章草 documentary grass script. This is a modification of LiShu. The most prevalent form of super cursive is JinCao 今草modern grass script. It was pioneered by  WangXiZhi 王羲之 321-379 AD. It is still used today. The third style was used in the Tang dynasty 618-905 AD it is called KuangCao 狂草erratic grass script.

Hmm cool

The new words in Japanese are actually more often phonetic loan words from English. Sorta amusing that we're using English and Chinese is using Japanese.

Font is usually フォント (English "font") or 書体, memory is メモリ (English "memory") or 容量 when talking about capacity.

So we use the phonetic alphabet(s) a lot more often now, especially in the past couple of years. One good thing about that is that the phonetic alphabets look good in ClearType

scobleizer wrote:

Splitting vids up makes them much harder to produce -- I'm evaluating doing that, though, cause lots of people want me to do shorter vids. That's why we developed the clip technology so people can tell you what the cool part of the video is.

Perhaps more useful than splitting would be producing more than one resolution.  That could be automated fairly easily.   Personally I'd be interested in higher res versions as well, especially when the topic is something graphical.

If there was only something that does as much for CRT's. On my Viewsonic PT795 (which uses an aperture grill a la Trinitron), Cleartype is a disaster. Completely unusable. Therefore I use "Standard" smoothing in XP, though it's almost the same as not using anything at all. Vista has me concerned. 5270 looks even worse with Cleartype on, and with it off it's still not nearly as sharp as XP (I use a Radeon 9600XT, incidentally). It's something about the new fonts, which show up in a lot of places (e.g. Windows Mail), as they're just blurry, almost as if they're using Cleartype even when I have Cleartype disabled. Perhaps an LCD is a must-buy for Vista.

Did Microsoft buy the ClearType name from HarperCollins?  Collins was using the name all through the 20th century.

Peter

Interesting video. The channel9 stuff makes MS look like a pretty interesting place to work.

scobleizer wrote:

ploe wrote: if size is a problem what about splitting the vids up in chunks?

Splitting vids up makes them much harder to produce -- I'm evaluating doing that, though, cause lots of people want me to do shorter vids. That's why we developed the clip technology so people can tell you what the cool part of the video is.

I think people want shorter videos because they're not really interested in the subject in the first place. It seems after watching this fonts video that they had a lot more to say and they seemed quite disappointed that the time was up

Is the "1 hour tape" so you can limit your videos? I'm guessing there are longer tapes out there.

Heck, look at that computer museum video, that was 2 1hr videos and still I'm sure there was more to show. [A]

Harlequin wrote:

scobleizer wrote: ploe wrote: if size is a problem what about splitting the vids up in chunks? Splitting vids up makes them much harder to produce -- I'm evaluating doing that, though, cause lots of people want me to do shorter vids. That's why we developed the clip technology so people can tell you what the cool part of the video is.

I think people want shorter videos because they're not really interested in the subject in the first place. It seems after watching this fonts video that they had a lot more to say and they seemed quite disappointed that the time was up

Is the "1 hour tape" so you can limit your videos? I'm guessing there are longer tapes out there.

Heck, look at that computer museum video, that was 2 1hr videos and still I'm sure there was more to show.

I shoot on Mini-DV, which is limited to 60 minutes per tape. It also is usually limited because I make only one-hour meeting requests. It keeps us from rambling too much (and making files that are too difficult to download).

By the way, here's an Adobe post on the same topic: http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2005/12/quality_in_type.html

>Did Microsoft buy the ClearType name from HarperCollins?

If it's a trademark then it applies to maps - and as its not related to font rendering technology Microsoft wouldn’t need to "buy" it.

That's why Nike can produce a line of golf-wear under the name Verdana and Microsoft can't do anything to stop them

http://www.dickssportinggoods.com/sm-nike-verdana-golf-glove-women--pi-1858868.html

Cheers, Si

Thanks Bill for your genius!!  I bought a Dell Axim X51v due to you chatting about reading books.  I love it and I also love the new fonts in Mobile 5.  Any special issues you and the ClearType team had in developing ClearType fonts for Mobile 5?

iStation wrote:

美留丘さま！明瞭字体！万歳！
Bill Hill! Clear Type! Hooray! (UTF-8)

I'm reading this on Windows Vista 5270 and the difference on the Japanese fonts is truly astounding. I'll see if I can get a screenshot of this post in both Vista and XP and post them both so you can see the difference yourselves (for those who don't have Vista).

Vistaの日本字は大好きですよ。

I've applied the font "Microsoft YaHei" which I believe is one of the new Japanese fonts to the text above, you'll see the difference when I post the screen.

Alright, here are the images for your viewing pleasure.

XP:
Vista:

And here're zoomed versions:
XP:

Vista:


As you can see, XP does no anti-aliasing on the Japanese whatsoever, while this new font in Vista is nicely anti-aliased using Cleartype just like the roman characters.

Khamul wrote:

I set the default font for Visual Studio to Consolas. It looks good. Much easier on the eyes than Courier New.

Me too, and like it. First impression, not much to look at, but it is indeed agreeable for long stretches of work. (I use 10pt.)

Lucida Console was my previous favorite for VS, but Consolas gives more whitespace between lines - easier on the eye, and, on lots of occasions you don't feel the need to put in empty lines.

DevilsRejection wrote:

EDIT: I can't freaking emphasize how much the clear type tuner works.

So true.

You REALLY REALLY need to do something about the interview guy.

Almost all channel 9 videos are aggravating to watch because of him. When he goes on one of his BAHAHAHAHAHA!!! streaks, it's just painful.

You're showing this stuff to the whole world; making the videos palatable is really not important to you?

What happened to a curious, modest geek who will just ask relevant questions and reverently listen?

Also, *please* focus on the screens when you shoot. There was this one video about the new eye candy in Vista, and the screen shots were literally seconds long, then the camera would pan back to the guy and watch him speak for half an our.

WTF??

I find ClearType amazing, too,
but only at small fonts. If I look at large font sizes, it's not even as good as Windows standard anti-aliasing!

Look for yourselves:
http://home.pfaffenhofen.de/lehmayr/Pictures/cleartype01.png
http://home.pfaffenhofen.de/lehmayr/Pictures/cleartype02.png
http://home.pfaffenhofen.de/lehmayr/Pictures/standard01.png
http://home.pfaffenhofen.de/lehmayr/Pictures/standard02.png

Perhaps you at Microsoft are already aware of this. Is there a way to combine the good parts of both methods?

Sven Groot wrote:

Alright, here are the images for your viewing pleasure.

XP:
Vista:

This is on my Windows Xp.



Same text supersized.