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        Microsoft typography group launches blog

        Doug | Date: Oct 18, 2005 | Comments: 1



        Typography is something we generally take for granted. Mike Duggan, a member of the Microsoft Typography Research Group, has started a blog to shed some light on the artistry and craftsmanship that goes into good typography and font design, particularly as they relate to computer displays.




        So what does typography have to do with Windows Embedded development? Creating readable pages on the small-sized, low-resolution screens typical of mobile devices is a non-trivial exercise. But because the Typography group has already done the heavy lifting, application developers don't have to think about it. Duggan says future blog posts will "go into more details, a behind the scenes look at the 'black art' of making your fonts invisible."


        From Mike Duggan's blog

        Mike Hall, an embedded product manager at Microsoft, points out that Windows XP Embedded uses the same desktop font/driver model as Windows XP Pro. Windows CE, on the other hand, incorporates both scalable TrueType fonts and fixed-size bitmapped fonts. The latter are useful for simple devices such as a 2-line alphanumeric LCD display that doesn't need a font scaling engine. Removing the scaling engine and TrueType fonts saves space in the target executable image, according to Hall.

        Microsoft's Typography Research Group has its own website with information, resources, tools, and utilities about type fonts and font technologies.

        Read the FontBlog here.



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