Typography and Vista fonts

Microsoft should be appreciated for its efforts on improving on-screen readability. Microsoft's Cognitive psychologist, Kevin Larson's article "The Technology of Text" in IEEE Spectrum, May 2007 is awesome. It explains about Typography and how psychologists, type designers and software engineers are working together to improve it.

My father and I usually had a discussion -- how can arts help an electronics and computer engineer like me? His version is that, Philosophy is the mother of all sciences -- psychology, sociology, engineering etc, and we need arts, ethics, and aesthetics. By the way, Aesthetics is "the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature and expression of beauty, as in the fine arts". After reading this article, I have no doubt in his words. Whatever we do, we are doing it for the betterment of our lives. The effort to improve the aesthetics behind displaying on-screen text is a fine arts subject called Calligraphy, the art of beautiful writing.

One can think, how much difference will the new Vista fonts have on our perception? Take a look at this pdf file from an article in "The Montoya Herald" website. One can not stop appreciating the difference.

We don't need to install Windows Vista for these fonts. Microsoft’s free PowerPoint 2007 viewer includes the six new ClearType fonts developed for Vista. So, we can get them legally, without license issues and for no charge. Before adding them, download and install "ClearType Tuner" from Microsoft's website and see how it improves text clarity. This step is completely optional.

To install them on Linux, use "cabextract" software to extract the "PowerPointViewer.exe" file. I have not tried it, but a post on Matt Thomas' website showed that the commands are something like these:

$ cabextract PowerPointViewer.exe
$ cabextract ppviewer.cab
$ ls *TTF

Wow, text on my laptop screen looks elegant, similar to a laser print!