Verdana

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Verdana
Typeface Verdana
Category Sans-serif
Designer(s) Matthew Carter
Foundry Monotype

Verdana is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Matthew Carter for Microsoft Corporation, with hand-hinting done by Agfa Monotype’s Tom Rickner. Demand for such a typeface was recognized by Virginia Howlett of Microsoft's typography group. The name “Verdana” is a mix of verdant (something green, as in the Seattle area and the Evergreen state, Washington), and Ana (the name of Virginia's eldest daughter).

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[edit] Description

Released in 1996, Verdana was bundled with subsequent versions of Microsoft's Windows operating system, as well as their Office and Internet Explorer software on both Windows and Mac OS. In addition, it was long available for download from Microsoft's web site allowing it to be used by any system supporting TrueType fonts. As a result, it is now installed on most desktop computers. The redistributable downloadable file is still available from a third-party web site; see the External links section.

Bearing similarities to Humanist sans-serif typefaces such as Frutiger, Verdana was designed to be readable at small sizes on a computer screen. The lack of serifs, large x-height (heights of lower-case letters, as scaled to the letter x being exactly equal to one), wide proportions, loose letter-spacing, large counters (spaces inside partially enclosed portions of letters or symbols such as "c", "s", or curved quotation marks), and emphasized distinctions between similarly-shaped characters are chosen to increase readability. As a result, it is often chosen by web designers attempting to cram large amounts of text into a small space. Indeed, Verdana is so much more readable than other common fonts of the same sizes that some have suggested that web authors not specify it for the body text of a web page, because then the author is likely to select a font size that makes the text unreadable when Verdana is unavailable [1]. According to one long-running survey [2], the availability of Verdana is 94% on Windows (making it the second most common font on that platform) and 92.6% on computers running Macintosh OS.

An example of the attention given to making similar letters distinguishable, the capital letter 'I' in Verdana has serifs, even though Verdana is a sans-serif font. This makes it easily distinguishable from 'l' (ell) and '1' (one).

The Tahoma typeface is similar to Verdana but with tighter letter-spacing; other similar faces include Frutiger and Bitstream Vera Sans.

The typeface was nominated for the Best Of British Design Award on BBC Two's The Culture Show on January 26, 2006.

[edit] Combining characters bug

Verdana (v. 2.43) uses an incorrect position for combining diacritical marks, causing them to display on the following character instead of the preceding. This makes it unsuitable for Unicode-encoded text such as Cyrillic or Greek. If Verdana is installed, diacritics below are displayed over the letter e, whereas they should have appeared over the letter a. This bug does not usually reveal itself with Latin letters. This is because some font display engines substitute sequences of base character + combining character with a precomposed character glyph.

In Verdana: (assuming you have it installed)

а̀е а́е а̃е а̉е | ὰε άε α̃ε α̉ε | àe áe ãe ảe

On some platforms the Opera browser automatically fixes this Verdana bug. If the examples below and above look identical (and your browser's current font is not Verdana), combining marks are on the right places.

In your browser's current font:

а̀е а́е а̃е а̉е | ὰε άε α̃ε α̉ε | àe áe ãe ảe

(The first column is Cyrillic, the second column is Greek, and the third column is Latin)

[edit] See also

[edit] References

[edit] External links

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