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Microsoft Office’s new default font: Aptos
- outside1234 3y agoI live in Aptos, California (which the font it named after) :)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- liminalsunset 3y agohttps://twitter.com/Microsoft/status/1387421368581455874 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. Here's an example of the five fonts, Bierstadt, Skeena, Seaford, Grandview, and Tenorite. https://imgur.io/gallery/Dx91rtr https://imgur.io/gallery/Dx91rtr
- Krasnol 3y agoThey probably decided that fewer people know the painter than would make fun of Beer City.
- tda 3y agoThanks! Grandview is horrible. Bierstadt is ok but I would have preferred Skeena.
- soupfordummies 3y agoBeen using Bierstadt for years, glad it won!
- aydio 3y agoLooks 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.
- velcrovan 3y agoMaybe 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]. [1] — https://practicaltypography.com/how-to-embed-fonts-in-a-word-document.html https://practicaltypography.com/how-to-embed-fonts-in-a-word... [2] — https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office_standards/ms-oe376/22da0d03-7202-4731-9518-b96bfbe4de61 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office_standards...
- darreninthenet 3y agoIs there a decent word processor that does handle this correctly?
- anon373839 3y agoApple 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.
- jwells89 3y agoBetter 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.
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- benatkin 3y agoSeems lazy to name it after a seaside community, and potentially harmful by bringing attention to it and causing more sprawl.
- Kwpolska 3y agoApple 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?
- benatkin 3y agoProbably, at least with Mavericks. Those names also annoy me and I wish they'd stop.
- drekipus 3y agoHarmful? As a formally harmed person, does that word have any weight or meaning anymore? "Sprawl" from a name of font? Not anything like policies, media, immigration etc. No, the name of a font. That's harmful. Do we need a reality check?
- kristianp 3y ago> 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.
- data-ottawa 3y ago> 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.
- slavapestov 3y agoI don’t care what anyone says, I’m sticking with Computer Modern.
- acumenical 3y agoNaming 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.
- ecf 3y agoScript typefaces are the only fonts with true class.
- LegitShady 3y agoevery default microsoft office style will become the high school writing assignment archetype.
- canucker2016 3y agoFraudsters 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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_imperial_year see https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/12/15961354/pakistan-calibri-font-scandal-forged-documents https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/12/15961354/pakistan-calibri... and https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/01/microsofts-fonts-catch-out-another-fraudster-this-time-in-canada/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/01/microsofts-fonts-cat...
- canucker2016 3y agoLooks like the five new fonts were widely available as early as 2021 April 28 - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2021/04/28/beyond-calibri-finding-microsofts-next-default-font/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2021/04/2... though Aptos isn't officially available as Aptos until 2023 July.
- soupfordummies 3y agoHeyyy, Bierstadt won! I’ve been using it for a while!
- esbeeb 3y ago"Linux Biolinum O" all the way! :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Libertine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Libertine I appreciate how it's Debian-packaged into the "fonts-linuxlibertine" package, but is it installed by default in Linux Mint? Alas, no.
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoOfficial blog post https://medium.com/@MicrosoftDesign/a-change-of-typeface-microsofts-new-default-font-has-arrived-f200eb16718d https://medium.com/@MicrosoftDesign/a-change-of-typeface-mic... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36714094 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36714094
- sombragris 3y agoLooks nice. I know that taste is subjective, but for me, between Arial, Calibri, and this one, I consider Aptos the best of the three.
- jiggawatts 3y agoA 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. [4] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/Gutenberg_bible_Old_Testament_Epistle_of_St_Jerome.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/Gutenber...
- nunuvit 3y agoThank 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.
- jiggawatts 3y agoTurning 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. Word now supports SVG format vector artwork natively. There are icon packs from vendors in SVG format now. E.g.: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/icons/#icon-terms https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/icons/#... 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.