Maybe if they gave a shit about typography they would fix the bug in Word that prevents it from embedding more than one style of a given font:
> Perhaps most infuriating, Word will embed any number of styles per family, but it will only display one. Meaning, if you’re using regular, italic, bold, and bold italic in your document, all four styles will be embedded. But when your recipient opens the file, only the regular will display correctly; the italic, bold, and bold italic will be Word-synthesized approximations, not the embedded fonts.
> This last limitation means that Microsoft Word has reached the exalted state where it is not compatible with itself: it is writing data into its file format that it cannot read. Worst of all, this is not a bug—it’s the intended behavior [2].
The author of [1] has a set of excellently handcrafted fonts for legal documents in particular that are layout matches for commonly used fonts like Times or Arial but have distinctive looks instead.
Also offers pro-tips for typography for lawyers and for general office typography.
OK, valid complaint, but honestly this is the first time I hear about the font style "oblique".
Wikipedia says
> Oblique type is a form of type that slants slightly to the right, used for the same purposes as italic type. Unlike italic type, however, it does not use different glyph shapes; it uses the same glyphs as roman type, except slanted
So the use case for both italic and oblique font styles in the same document is very... opaque to me :)
The Victor Mono font is an example of a font that provides both. I use Italics for block comments, and Oblique for line comments. Do I need to? No. Does it look way better and make me happy? Yep.
Apple Pages. It also renders fonts much, much better - the difference in kerning quality is night and day. Unfortunately, Pages just doesn’t provide a lot of flexibility and power for formatting the document. It’s more like Google Docs - suitable for high school book reports.
Pages is awful for things like bibliographies and referencing. It's LaTeX is janky, underpowered, and for some ungodly reason avoids computer modern like the plague. In 99% of things you will be just one option short of what you actually want to display.
With that said it is easy to use. The documents almost always look like a document and not a bunch of text that has incidentally ended up on the same page. It doesn't take up too much vertical by using side panels well. It makes everything it does let you do easy.
I have used heaps of WYSIWYG editors over the last 30 years. I have used some LaTeX ones too.
Pages is the only one where I would keep the UI and just add more functionality (somehow without changing the UI).
Better font rendering has been a hallmark of mac apps since OS X was released. Even the version of TextEdit (mac Notepad/WordPad analogue, for those unfamiliar) that shipped with OS X 10.0 likely beats out Word when it comes to things like kerning.
What’s strange is that I use Microsoft Word on a Mac, and the font rendering is uniquely terrible in Word. At times it can seem that Microsoft goes out of its way to make its products do a bad job with core functionality.
Naming issues and critiques of this new font aside, I'm glad the era of Calibri is coming to an end. What a horrible font that was, unparalleled in its ability to make any copy look like a high school writing assignment. At least Times New Roman had class.
Fraudsters and digital archaeologists take note. Your docs can be dated due to the font used. Now we enter the Aptos era - maybe we can date docs like Japanese refer to dates? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_imperial_year
https://twitter.com/Microsoft/status/1387421368581455874
These are the five candidates that it seems like the font was picked from, of which Bierstadt appears to have been chosed and renamed to Aptos. On the surface the new default font looks a little like Public Sans to me.
Tenorite seems to look like some form of a Gotham ish one, Grandview is some form of DIN it seems.
It's interesting how opinions differ. I would have said that I quite like Grandview, though probably prefer Tenorite. I really dislike how thin the strokes in Skeena are on the top of the e or a for example.
A lot of people here are making comments along the lines of: "font rendering is uniquely terrible in Word."
While true, there is a setting for good kerning which is disabled by default for backwards compatibility reasons[1]. It's just so well hidden that I'm fairly certain that I'm one of maybe dozens of humans on the face of the planet using it.[2]
1. Go to the Styles ribbon control area and right-click the Normal style.
2. Select the Modify menu item.
3. Click the Format button in the bottom left.
4. Select the Font menu item.
5. Select the Advanced tab.
6. Tick the checkbox labelled "Kerning for fonts". Set the size to something small like "6 Points or above".
7. While you're here, turn on Ligatures. "Standard Only" is fine.
If the above doesn't make you breathe into a paper bag in a panic[3], also consider turning justification on so that we can use 5 GHz multi-core CPUs to finally catch up to the fancy paragraph layout algorithms introduced by this young chap called Gutenberg.[4] Any day now, Microsoft Word will catch up to the first moveable type printer ever made. Any day now...
[1] Backwards compatibility is not a good reason for new documents to use the 1990s defaults, but Microsoft doesn't care about your silly common sense and "logic", okay?
[2] There's dozens of us achieving good typography in Word, I tell you! Dozens!
[3] Some coworkers literally had a panic attack and made me revert the settings because they're "unauthorised" and not the defaults. I wish I was kidding.
Thank you for the tutorial! I don't mean to be greedy, but would you mind sharing your top MS Word typography tip that you think people should know? Aside from this one.
Turning on full justification and kerning do most of the heavy lifting.
The next biggest thing for most technical documents is maintaining the fidelity of drawings, diagrams, and charts. Many people paste low-resolution JPEGs into their documents, which looks like trash, especially on 4K screens or if printed.
Even older versions could paste in vector-format diagrams from other apps by using "Paste special -> Enhanced metafile".
Metafiles are the "native" vector format for the Windows GDI drawing and printing APIs, and provide the maximum quality and retain all of the original formatting details one-to-one. They're also small and efficient to display.
If none of those are possible, I insert images like company logos by scaling them up at the source to fill a 4K screen, take a screenshot, save as a PNG, and then insert that at a small size. This provides crisp edges at all but the most ludicrous resolutions.
> The US State Department only just directed its employees to use Calibri for memos earlier this year. The State Department had been using Times New Roman instead since 2004. Given it’s taken them the full 16 years to switch over to Calibri, they’ll probably be waiting another decade or more to eventually switch to Aptos.
> The US State Department only just directed its employees to use Calibri for memos earlier this year. The State Department had been using Times New Roman instead since 2004. Given it’s taken them the full 16 years to switch over to Calibri, they’ll probably be waiting another decade or more to eventually switch to Aptos.
I quite like Times New Roman, it saddens me a little to see it looked down on as if it’s outdated, and to that end I’m glad they commissioned a new font so a well known typeface won’t get shunned like Times New Roman.
Looks good. Hopefully they'll update their Fluent UI libraries in a timely fashion to include the font as we've been in the process of redesigning our Office add-in.
Apple has been naming entire operating systems after real-world places since about ten years, do you think anything bad happened because of the attention Apple gave to Mavericks or Ventura?
> Perhaps most infuriating, Word will embed any number of styles per family, but it will only display one. Meaning, if you’re using regular, italic, bold, and bold italic in your document, all four styles will be embedded. But when your recipient opens the file, only the regular will display correctly; the italic, bold, and bold italic will be Word-synthesized approximations, not the embedded fonts.
> This last limitation means that Microsoft Word has reached the exalted state where it is not compatible with itself: it is writing data into its file format that it cannot read. Worst of all, this is not a bug—it’s the intended behavior [2].
[1] — https://practicaltypography.com/how-to-embed-fonts-in-a-word...
[2] — https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office_standards...