Microsoft Office’s new default font: Aptos | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Office’s new default font: Aptos

theverge.com

59 pointseXpl0it3r46 comments

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].

[1] — https://practicaltypography.com/how-to-embed-fonts-in-a-word...

[2] — https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office_standards...

Is there a decent word processor that does handle this correctly?

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.

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.

I always marvel at what Windows users put up with re: fonts. And it doesn't seem to be getting better.

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.

Care to share an Image? I have no idea what you are talking about.

So true. Pages is a modern-day version of "The Writing Center" from my Macintosh IIci.

I love Pages and I hate Pages.

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).

Unironically latex. It's a whole damn programming language but you can be sure it'll be readable 50 years from now

Wait, what? What would be the advantage of this? There must be a reason why this is done like that?

A reason? Yes.

A good one? No.

Can you elaborate or point me into a direction to read more?

This is indeed surprising. CSS to the opposite handles this correctly and allows fine-grained control.

The synthetic substitutions still exist, but only if you fail to provide the font variants.

If I'm not mistaken, browsers still allow using embedded font variants if they are available in e.g. one OTF file

CSS may handle this correctly in theory, but real implementations still have challenges with fonts that provide separate oblique and italic styles.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60746818/how-can-i-use-b...

[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58073983/how-to-show-dif...

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 :)

Sounds like a case of the perfect vs the good

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.

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.

https://typographyforlawyers.com/what-is-good-typography.htm...

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.

Script typefaces are the only fonts with true class.

every default microsoft office style will become the high school writing assignment archetype.

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

see https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/12/15961354/pakistan-calibri... and https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/01/microsofts-fonts-cat...

Looks like the five new fonts were widely available as early as 2021 April 28 - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2021/04/2...

though Aptos isn't officially available as Aptos until 2023 July.

Heyyy, Bierstadt won! I’ve been using it for a while!

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

They probably decided that fewer people know the painter than would make fun of Beer City.

Thanks! Grandview is horrible. Bierstadt is ok but I would have preferred Skeena.

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.

My favorite is Grandview.

Been using Bierstadt for years, glad it won!

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.

[4] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/Gutenber...

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.

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/#...

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.

I have an unmodified install of Office 365. In that dialog kerning for fonts is set to 1. And ligatures are set to standard and contextual.

> 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 don’t care what anyone says, I’m sticking with Computer Modern.

"Linux Biolinum O" all the way! :) 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.

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.

I live in Aptos, California (which the font it named after) :)

Official blog post

https://medium.com/@MicrosoftDesign/a-change-of-typeface-mic...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36714094

Looks nice. I know that taste is subjective, but for me, between Arial, Calibri, and this one, I consider Aptos the best of the three.

Seems lazy to name it after a seaside community, and potentially harmful by bringing attention to it and causing more sprawl.

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?

Probably, at least with Mavericks. Those names also annoy me and I wish they'd stop.

Harmful?

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?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com