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| Home > Typography > Microsoft Fonts To Be Offered in PostScript Formats |
| Microsoft Fonts To Be Offered in PostScript Formats | | Date Created: 11 Apr, 2005, 10:59 AM |
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PRESS RELEASE: Ascender to make popular Windows and Microsoft Office Fonts available to Developers
Chicago, Illinois -- April 11, 2005 -- Ascender Corp. today announced that they have entered into an agreement with Microsoft which enables Ascender to distribute Microsoft fonts, including the Windows Core Fonts, the Microsoft Web Fonts and the many multilingual fonts currently supplied by Microsoft.
Under the agreement, Ascender may adapt the Microsoft fonts for software and hardware developers. Ascender also plans to offer the Microsoft Web Fonts in the PostScript and OpenType formats to corporate users, home users and design professionals. The Microsoft Web Fonts have not previously been available in the PostScript format.
The Ascender Font Store website is being launched today to allow end users to purchase and download Microsoft fonts from http://www.ascenderfonts.com.
"We have made a tremendous investment in both high quality Latin and multilingual fonts and are proud to be working with other industry leaders to bring the best technology solutions to customers," said David Kaefer, Microsoft's Director, Business Development. "This is an example of how companies can collaborate, license their intellectual property and further innovation to support customer needs."
"Most of the fonts we are making available today were developed, in part, with Ascender. Microsoft has great faith in Ascender's ability to expertly satisfy the font needs of developers and end-users in any environment," said Lori Brownell, Director of Windows International.
"Microsoft's fonts are renowned for their quality, display legibility and extensive character sets. The availability of these fonts represents an incredible opportunity for hardware and software developers to enhance their products," said Ira Mirochnick, President of Ascender Corporation. "By incorporating Microsoft fonts into their products, developers will address Windows compatibility and application issues, and will solve multilingual challenges."
About Ascender Corp:
Ascender Corporation is a Chicago-based company specializing in custom font development and multilingual Unicode compliant font solutions. The company's founders have been involved in the development of many of the most highly regarded fonts presently used in computers, phones and printers. Ascender has the expertise to solve complex font technology issues, the imagination to create font branding solutions, and the initiative to create value for our customers.
Contact:
Bill Davis, Ascender Corporation
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I e-mailed Bill about this news to find out more about Acsender's target audience for these fonts. Here's what he had to say...
Hi Benjamin,
Thanks for your e-mail.
There are two audiences for the Microsoft fonts – developers and end users (the design community). For the design community the key benefits are:
- Availability of key Microsoft web fonts that were never made before in Type 1 or OpenType PostScript. So now Georgia, Verdana, Tahoma, Comic Sans are available to designers who may have preferred PostScript versions for workflow purposes.
- Nina, a condensed version of Tahoma, is also available for the first time to designers. It was previously released in a version of Windows for smartphones and PDAs, but never for end users to license |
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- Character Sets: the OpenType versions of the Microsoft fonts all support the WGL character set which addresses all the popular European languages including Greek, Cyrillic and Baltic. (of course the Type 1 version is only Latin-1 because of its limitations).
- Hinting for on-screen display: the Microsoft fonts are renowned for their on-screen quality in Windows or PDF files.
Another important point is font customization: we can modify any Microsoft for a customer as needed. From adding/changing character sets to producing a different font format or platform support. Creating custom fonts is one of Ascender’s specialties.
The Ascender team has worked with Microsoft for years, and we view this license as an endorsement of our reputation for producing high-quality fonts, and for providing great customer service.
Hope this gives you some good additional information.
All the best,
- Bill |
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