Microsoft has released Office 2010 as a beta that you can use up to and including October 2010 (scheduled to be released in June 2010). You can download it as either 32 or 64 bit, although it seems the 64 bit download is a bit hidden since many buttons for downloading seem to lead to the default 32 bit download. If you follow the link at the Professional Plus site to 'Get It Now' you should be presented with links to both versions. At the moment Microsoft supports Chinese (Simplified), English, French, German, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish. If you are like me you just use the application in English, but then miss some of the proofing tools for, say, Japanese.

You can download language packs from the Microsoft Download Center. If you change the language to, say, Japanese you are presented with two download links at the bottom for the Japanese language pack. This language pack includes user interface changes for Japanese as well as proofing tools, OCR support, and fonts.

Once the pack is downloaded just run it and you can customize want you want to install. Since I am not interested in the UI aspects of the pack, I selected the top part and toggled selection for all to not install. Then for the entries <span lang="ja">国際フォント</span> (international fonts) and <span lang="ja">文章校正ツール</span> (proofing tools) I made sure to install everything. <span lang="ja">文章校正ツール</span> includes both <span lang="ja">日本語用校正ツール</span> and <span lang="ja">英語用校正ツール</span> and I guess you can most likely skip <span lang="ja">英語用校正ツール</span> since it is already installed. <span lang="ja">国際フォント</span> includes <span lang="ja">標準フォント</span> (standards font), which I am guessing is related to JIS X standards for font encodings.

Basic Windows 7 has 134 fonts installed. A basic English Office 2010 install increases this to 198 fonts installed. Installing the Japanese language pack proofing tools with fonts brings this to 228 fonts installed.

If you press the expansion arrow at the bottom-right of the Home part of the ribbon (or press CTRL-D) you will get the Font dialog. If you select the Advanced tab you can turn on features such as OpenType ligatures. This will mean that with text such as 'fl' or 'ffi' certain parts of the letters will connect instead of showing white space between the letters. This is the same technique used in printed media such as books.

Update: Michael Hendry was kind enough to point out that I was mistaking <span lang="ja">標準</span> (standard/default) with <span lang="ja">基準</span> (standards/JIS/ISO).

It looks like the Chinese Office 2010 font list is the following (Changzhou SinoType, Founder, Microsoft, Stone):

• FZShuTi
• FZYaoTi
• LiSu
• Microsoft YaHei
• Microsoft YaHei Bold
• STCaiyun
• STFangsong
• STHupo
• STKaiti
• STLiti
• STSong
• STXihei
• STXingkai
• STXinwei
• STZhongsong
• YouYuan

From the language pack make sure to select <span lang="zh-CN">国际字体</span> (international fonts) and <span lang="zh-CN">校对工具</span> (proofing tools). Under <span lang="zh-CN">国际字体</span> we have <span lang="zh-CN">典型字体</span> (typical fonts) and under <span lang="zh-CN">校对工具</span> we have <span lang="zh-CN">简体中文校对工具</span> (Simplified Chinese proofing tools) and <span lang="zh-CN">英语校对工具</span> (English proofing tools).

It seems the Office 2010 font list is the following (English installation):

• Algerian
• Arial Unicode MS
• Baskerville Old Face
• Bauhaus 93
• Bell MT
• Berlin Sans FB
• Bernard MT Condensed
• Bodoni MT Poster Compressed Light
• Book Antiqua
• Bookman Old Style
• Bookshelf Symbol 7
• Britannic Bold
• Broadway
• Brush Script MT Italic
• Californian FB
• Centaur
• Century Gothic
• Century
• Chiller
• Colonna MT
• Cooper Black
• Footlight MT Light
• Freestyle Script
• Garamond
• Haettenschweiler
• Harlow Solid Semi Expanded Italic
• Harrington
• High Tower Text
• Informal Roman
• Jokerman
• Juice ITC
• Kristen ITC
• Kunstler Script
• Latin Wide
• Lucide Bright
• Lucida Calligraphy Italic
• Lucida Fax
• Lucida Handwriting Italic
• Magneto Bold
• Matura MT Script Capitals
• Mistral
• Modern No. 20
• Modern
• Monotype Corsiva Italic
• MS Outlook
• MS Reference Sans Serif
• MS Reference Specialty
• MS Sans Serif
• MS Serif
• MT Extra
• Niagara Engraved
• Niagara Solid
• OCRB Regular
• Old English Text MT
• Onyx
• Parchment
• Playbill
• Poor Richard
• Ravie
• Roman
• Showcard Gothic
• Snap ITC
• Stencil
• Tempus Sans ITC
• Viner Hand ITC
• Vivaldi Italic
• Vladimir Script
• Wingdings 2
• Wingdings 3

It looks like the Japanese Office 2010 font list is the following (all by RICOH):

• HGGothicE
• HGGothicM Medium
• HGGyoshotai Medium
• HGKyokashotai Medium
• HGMaruGothicMPRO
• HGMinchoB Bold
• HGMinchoE
• HGPGothicE
• HGPGothicM Medium
• HGPGyoshotai Medium
• HGPKyokashotai Medium
• HGPMinchoB Bold
• HGPMinchoE
• HGPSoeiKakugothicUB
• HGPSoeiKakupoptai
• HGPSoeiPresence EB Extra-Bold
• HGSeikaishotaiPRO
• HGSGothicE
• HGSGothicM Medium
• HGSGyoshotai Medium
• HGSKyokashotai Medium
• HGSMinchoB Bold
• HGSMinchoE
• HGSoeiKakugothicUB
• HGSoeiKakupoptai
• HGSoeiPresenceE Extra-Bold
• HGSSoeiKakugothicUB
• HGSSoeiKakupoptai
• HGSSoeiPresence EB Extra-Bold

I encountered a blog posting on the Adobe typography weblog on the phasing out of Type 1 fonts which recently got updated (October 2007) with some new statistics on the sale of Adobe's Type 1 fonts. Approximately 85%-90% of their current sales is in OpenType fonts.

If you're in the professional design business this means that if you still buy Type 1 you should start to see the writing on the wall. Not to mention that in order to support more and more scripts' features world-wide OpenType is kept updated, whereas Type 1 is dead functionality-wise.

Now that Microsoft allows you to download the Consolas font the question becomes how to add it to the list of choices for the command prompt properties.

In the Microsoft Knowledge Base article 247815 you can find instructions on how to add a font.

Basically on most default Windows XP installations it boils down to adding a String name '00' to the HKLMSoftwareMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionConsoleTrueTypeFont with a value of 'Consolas' (the corresponding name from HKLMSoftwareMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionFonts).

I use MathML. Why? Because it just makes sense for mathematics on the websites.

On my DragonFly I had to do the following:

Installed X.org 6.8.1 or .2. Enable xfs (the X font server) by adding xfs_enable="YES" to rc.conf.

From ports install x11-fonts/ttmkfdir and x11-fonts/urwfonts-ttf.

(Note: download doesn't exist anymore.)

New and better instructions: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/MathML_Project/Fonts

In /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF do:

# ttmkfdir > fonts.scale
# mkfontdir

This will update fonts.scale and fonts.dir, check them with cat or more to see if they contain references to the extracted new .ttf files.

Change /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fs/config to have /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/urwfonts-ttf added to catalogue.

Also add /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/urwfonts-ttf as a FontPath to /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

# xset fp+ /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/urwfonts-ttf
# xset fp rehash

Edited $HOME/.fonts.conf and added:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
  <match target="pattern">
    <test name="family">
      <string>symbol</string>
    </test>
    <edit name="family" mode="append" binding="strong">
      <string>Standard Symbols L</string>
    </edit>
  </match>
</fontconfig>

Added user_pref("font.mathfont-family", "Math1, Math2, Math4"); to $HOME/.mozilla/firefox/<profile.default>/user.js.

There seem to be some bugs still, at least in displaying the W3C test suite.

In a blaze of insane reasoning we now see that using or embedding GPL'd fonts with/in documents can/might/will make that document GPL'd as well.

http://nashi.altmuehlnet.de/pipermail/scribus/2005-April/010319.html discusses some of the finer points with regard to this issue.

On the FSF site we can find a mention of how fonts apparently are a difficult thing with the GPL.

Personally I am getting sick of licenses to the marrow of my bone.

A typical font license is quite similar to what Adobe says on their "What about fonts?" page.

To quote:

"You may embed typefaces into documents only under certain circumstances.
Adobe permits embedding certain typefaces into documents for the explicit
purpose of viewing and printing only."

An interesting article on the issue Font Licensing and Protection Details.

On the art side I totally fell in love with Ryan Church's work especially after seeing some of his concept artwork as laid out in my copy of The Making of Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith.

And to the question why people still use Windows try setting up your X environment to properly support MathML with Firefox.

Truly, using new fonts within X is a black art still reminiscent of dark and medieval times when we did not know better. I thought we would have progressed that stage by now.

From a user perspective Windows definitely wins hands down in this, drag a file to a Fonts folder, done.

No, X wants us to use crazy incantations of mkfontdir, mkfontscale, fc-cache, ttmkfdir, xset with various fp options and hope xlsfonts shows the font you are after.

Users do NOT want to be bothered with foundries, weights, encoding types, and what not. They just want to add a font, select it in their favourite application and go: "owww, pretty!"

Is that, anno 2004, too much to ask?

Apparently...