Countdown to PDC2008: What the heck are Microsoft’s Live Platform Services? Treadwell…

Great video. I've gone the embedding route myself a few times and would love for it to work across browsers and OSs. It's nice that you can embed the Windows fonts like Verdana but pointless since IE on Windows is the only browser that understands the embedding
so they'll have the font anyway.
Stepping away from the browser for a moment, Windows itself is a typographic mess, and I really hope that gets solved in Windows 7. Segoe UI is a great font, but Windows still uses the old fonts MS Sans Serif and Tahoma all over the place. Sometimes it even
uses multiple fonts in the same dialog (e.g. the new Vista style common file dialogs) which just looks messy.
This is especially horrible on Asian systems. Where Vista uses Segoe UI on western systems, it uses the brilliant new Meiryo font on Japanese. Meiryo is a great font, ClearType enabled, I absolutely love it. Then half the system still uses MS UI Gothic, which
is a bitmap font with no anti-aliasing at all at the smaller sizes. This looks
incredibly jarring. It's simply not an acceptable situation and I'm appaled that a company that according to Bill Hill's claims takes typography seriously could release such a mess.
Related, in Vista, even with IE8 beta 2, MS UI Gothic is still the default Japanese font in Internet Explorer. It's one of the first things I change in IE usually. Apparently screen reading in the browser is only important to Microsoft if you use the Roman
alphabet. There are no good Asian fonts available for web designers since Meiryo and the other new Asian fonts are available only on Vista. The fact that IE does not implement CSS font fallback correctly also doesn't help here if you have a webpage that mixes
Roman and Asian characters.
I also want to thank Bill for putting me onto eBooks with one of the early videos. I do nearly all my reading on my trusty Dell Axim X51v and don't leave the house without it. It makes all those train rides so much more bearable without having to drag heavy
paper books around. I have however been forced to dump Microsoft Reader because its DRM activation system has now made it impossible for me to buy any more books (because you need to activate for that and I can't do that anymore). I now use eReader which has
the added benefit of being able to specify the font you want to use, and I found Calibri looks really nice on my Axim's 192DPI display with ClearType.
I also use Meiryo on my PocketPC for
my own Japanese dictionary application. Whenever I show that to anyone who's not seen Meiryo before I'm generally met with disbelief at just how readable it is. Big kudos to the guys who created that font.
I’m not a fast reader. But I like to read. I take my time to take every thing in. I went and started to read the book found on your web site, The Mabinogion. I read for about an hour. I read about the fountain, the castles and black nights of who acquire
mortal wounds to the head with a sword. All interesting stuff. I pushed F11 and read the book at full screen mode on my 19" monitor desk top computer. I would like to go back and pick up were I have left off. Some kind of book mark would be nice.
Something I really miss about reading on screen is having an actual book in my hand something I can touch. A physical representation of volume. I had a hard time getting a good representation of how far into the book I was in relation to the finish. I saw the
page numbers and that helped some. I had to page threw several button pushes to see how close I was to finishing the chapter. I don’t know if this is relevant to any one ells but it’s my first thought when reading. I like knowing how big the book is im reading.
I evaluate the time i have to reading. I like to be able to finish the storys i start.
I liked the font, it was clear to read. Much more clear than the Gutenberg.org. The button up at the center top broke me away from reading. Maybe a button at the bottom right on the last page might help so I don’t have to search as far for the method to turn
the next page. I think scrowling also distracts from reading.
(Edit: links to the different chapters would also be nice. )
(Edit: i went back and finished the first story. in the book)
Fascinating video!
Discuss the issues with type in videos displayed on a web site?
Regarding assumptions, thought you would enjoy:
The Assumption Song
I'd just like to thank Bill and the typography team. I've been using Reader first on an Axiom (similar to one he briefly showed off back in the walk around the campus video) and then later I upgraded to the same HTC phone / PDA that he briefly showed off
in the video here.
The ability to have MS Reader and all the associated readability elements is probably the only thing that has allowed me to actually keep reading anything other than, well TechNet basically.
I never knew how, but something about reading books on Reader has always just been as natural as reading an actual book. It’s absolutely fascinating to hear about all the research that went in to achieving that experience.
Thank you. Your work is very much appreciated.
Bill suggested an interview with Greg Hitchcock. Is any one at Channel 9 heading over to him to hear about hinting fonts?
Hi. Bill Hill here.
"Manotype" is my new C9 username. For some reason I couldn't sign on to my previous account so I created a new one.
I'll make sure the issues you point out with Japanese Windows UI conflicts with some parts of the UI being in Meiryo, while others are not, are passed on to the relevant folks in Windows.
Glad you like Meiryo. It was built by the usual suspects -us.
I managed the group that did it and personally argued (in a very civilized way) with Bill Gates to get it funded, arguing that although it was a lot of money for a single font project, we (the ClearType and Readablity Research team) would use it as a testbed
to develop new technology which could be used to improve Simplified and Traditional Chinese and Korean as well.
Typographers Geraldine Wade and Mike Duggan in the ClearType team did a lot of work. Geraldine managed the project and did a fantastic job. Greg Hitchock was another big contributor.
We worked with a Japanese font company, (C&G, if my memory serves me right - which it often doesn't these days!), a tremendous Japanese type consultant called Eichii Kono - and Matthew Carter again.
One of the big issues with previous Japanese fonts was that they required hundreds of thousands of hand-tuned bitmaps. making one used to be a 50 man-year job. We developed new technology to use TrueType hinting, so the bitmaps are created on the fly and are
truly scalable.
Matthew and Eichii worked together to solve another problem with East Asian fonts, which is that mixed Kanji and Latin characters looked terrible. In the first lace, the Latin characters themselves were always awful. Matthew, using the Verdana work, and Eichii,
worked to integrate the Verdana glyphs with the Kanji and harmonize the way they worked together.
The project was a huge success. We completed it under budget and on time, in under 18 months (thanks to Geraldine!), and the new Chinese and Korean fonts in Vista used the same hinting technology.
Thanks Jason:
I agree with your comments about bookmarking, navigation, etc. I created that book just to show that you really could create text on a screen that someone would happily read for a very long time. I must be doing something right - an hour is an incredibly long
read on the Web! Glad you used F11; removing all distractions apart from the content helps.
I'm not a UI designer. I know that could have been made much better. I started off with "Next Page" buttons at the bottom of each page. Then I made a VCR-like bank of buttons. A real UI designer could do this so much better than me - I am only an egg (Michael Valentine Smith in Robert Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land").
Yes, Silverlight does support using fonts that are packaged up inside the Silverlight content. Still you have to be aware of font licensing when you do this.
-mark
Silverlight Program Manager
Microsoft
This post is provided "as-is"
Thanks so much for your interest and comments. Stay in touch, and drop in on my site from time to time, since it's developing day by day,
best wishes,
bill