Web Designers Probably Don’t Even Know To Feel Relieved
A sample of the font Georgia
Apple and Microsoft have renewed their font licensing agreement. The agreement gives Apple users continued use of Microsoft’s core fonts which include Andale Mono, Arial, Comic Sans MS, Courier New, Georgia, Impact, Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS, Verdana, and Webdings.
Here’s the backstory. Back around 1991, Microsoft licensed TrueType font technology from Apple. (There was a “font format war” going on between Adobe PostScript and Apple TrueType at the time.) Microsoft worked with Monotype to develop several TrueType versions of classic fonts—Arial (based on Helvetica), Courier New, Times New Roman—for release with Windows 3.1. These were “fine tuned” for screen legibility but they were also an example of Microsoft’s “embrace and extend” policy—they couldn’t own the original fonts but they owned their new versions.
In 1996, Microsoft started an initiative dubbed “Core fonts for the Web” whose idea was to create a standard pack of fonts that would be present on all computers so that web pages would have a consistent appearance from one computer to the next. Along with this initiative, they developed more fonts. They hired Matthew Carter to design Georgia and Verdana and designed Trebuchet MS, Comic Sans MS and Webdings in-house. They also licensed Impact, a font released by font-house Stephenson Blake in 1965. In 1998 they added Monotype.com which was later renamed Andale Mono. From 1996 to 2002, these core fonts were available for free download.
The license agreement for the core font package said that one could freely download, use and distribute the fonts but could not bundle them with commercial software. Software companies like Apple needed a license from Microsoft to include them. So Apple licensed Microsoft’s fonts to include with every Mac.
As a result, over the last ten years, these fonts have become considered “web safe” fonts because most computers have them pre-installed. That’s been great for web designers because they can design using one of those fonts or at least use them as a backup font if another preferred font isn’t installed. We’ve all come to take them for granted.
Luckily Microsoft and Apple struck a new license agreement and we won’t have to worry. No word on the terms or how long the new license lasts. I’d guess ten years, but that’s just a guess.
Bet you didn’t even know you were in danger of losing them, did you? Imagine being limited to designing web pages using only Helvetica, Times and Courier… ew.
August 3rd, 2007 at 4:12 pm
I hate those “embrace and extend” fonts, but Verdana and Georgia are awesome. Go M.C.
I’ve wondered for a while how those “core web fonts” made it into OS X now that Explorer is no longer pre-installed. I thought it might be because the Office demo came with all new Macs. I didn’t realize it was due to a separate licensing agreement.
I remember reading somewhere that Linux users, lacking such a license, can no longer officially use the core web fonts, but I wasn’t able to find a corroborating source. So maybe that’s just FUD.
Too bad the various “embedded font” technologies for Web pages never really took off; now that bandwidth is ubiquitous it might be worth revisiting. There’s always Flash.