Microsoft developed some seriously high-quality ClearType fonts for Windows Vista, Office 2007 and Office 2008. One of the great features of these fonts is that they are OpenType and take advantage of the alternate glyphs feature to include small caps and old-style figures.
This was an opportunity for Microsoft to right what just might be the greatest typographic travesty: the fake small caps feature in Office. All it does is reduce the size of standard caps by about 80%, which results in an inconsistent weight of the full vs "small" caps. But with real small caps embedded in these new fonts, Office could eschew fakes in favor of the real thing. Hundreds of millions of Office users would suddenly have good typography by default, and of course the billions of people who are impacted by the tyopgraphic defaults in Office would be happy too.
Alas, it was not to be. As you can see in the screenshot, Office continues to do brain-dead generated small caps, even for fonts where small caps characters are available. Note that Adobe InDesign gets it right (not too surprising for a page layout tool). This is one of those features where there will never be QFE for a large enterprise customer to save a multi-million dollar deal. But all the same, it should get fixed. It is simply the right thing to do. Office is by far the most widely used typographic program out there. The people who use it don't know any better, which is why the software should.
(Oh, and if you are a large enterprise organization and have a multi-million dollar deal with Microsoft, please do us all a favor and use your leverage to get this fixed. The typographic community will praise you far and wide.)
This was an opportunity for Microsoft to right what just might be the greatest typographic travesty: the fake small caps feature in Office. All it does is reduce the size of standard caps by about 80%, which results in an inconsistent weight of the full vs "small" caps. But with real small caps embedded in these new fonts, Office could eschew fakes in favor of the real thing. Hundreds of millions of Office users would suddenly have good typography by default, and of course the billions of people who are impacted by the tyopgraphic defaults in Office would be happy too.
Alas, it was not to be. As you can see in the screenshot, Office continues to do brain-dead generated small caps, even for fonts where small caps characters are available. Note that Adobe InDesign gets it right (not too surprising for a page layout tool). This is one of those features where there will never be QFE for a large enterprise customer to save a multi-million dollar deal. But all the same, it should get fixed. It is simply the right thing to do. Office is by far the most widely used typographic program out there. The people who use it don't know any better, which is why the software should.
(Oh, and if you are a large enterprise organization and have a multi-million dollar deal with Microsoft, please do us all a favor and use your leverage to get this fixed. The typographic community will praise you far and wide.)
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