Microsoft to release six new typefaces

Get ready CSS developers, there are six new typefaces coming from Microsoft that you'll soon have at your disposal as alternatives to Verdana, Arial, Georgia and Times. Microsoft will be offering the typefaces as part of future operating system updates and other Microsoft software products.

Thankfully, all six are not display faces but a mix of sans-serif, serif, and monospace fonts designed for long passages of text. For me the sans-serifs are the most spectacular, most notably the humanist Calibri and Corbel faces by Lucas de Groot and Jeremy Tankard respectively.

Now comes the obvious follow-up question -- will these be available outside of Windows for OS X and Linux? The latter, no way. OS X though is a possibility, should Microsoft choose to use them as the default application typeface for Microsoft Office, Windows Media Player, etc., for as I wrote about a while back, OS X wouldn't have Georgia or Verdana -- the two most popular serif/sans-serif web fonts around -- were it not for the bundling of Internet Explorer. Which, as most people already know, is a dead product and won't be updated again. One of these days OS X will ship without Internet Explorer, which could be right around the corner with Tiger, and new Mac purchasers could be browsing the web without the typefaces nearly everyone has standardized their sites on.

As a Mac user, I'm not terribly bothered by the news, as long as CSS developers who include proprietary typefaces in their style sheets are aware of all the cross-platform options available to them. I've been doing it myself for quite a while now with the OS X system face Lucida Grande as my preferred sans-serif, but I always ensure that Verdana, Arial, and of course sans-serif are also in the descending font-family attribute. It won't hurt me or anyone else to stick a couple more Microsoft-specific typeface names in there as well, as long as backups are provided.

Plus, let's be honest -- Verdana is getting pretty damn dull. It doesn't scale well above 11px, though it is leaps and bounds better than Arial at smaller point sizes. But on text heavy sites it can consume the overall style of the page, and everyone (developer to user) would benefit from a little typographic variety.

Get ready to see these everywhere by the end of the year. Well, at least on Windows.