Verdana is a 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, who named it after her daughter Ana. Font sample created by djmutex. ... In typography, serifs are the small features at the end of strokes within letters. ... In typography, a typeface consists of a co-ordinated set of character designs. ... Matthew Carter (born 1937) is a designer of digital fonts. ... Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) is the worlds largest software company, with over sixty thousand employees and headquarters in various countries as of May 2004. ... Virginia Howlett (born 1951 in Edmonton, Canada) is a designer and painter. ... Typographic work Typography (from the Greek words typos = form and grapho = write) is the art and technique of selecting and arranging type styles, point sizes, line lengths, line leading, character spacing, and word spacing for typeset applications. ...

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. 1996 is a leap year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year for the Eradication of Poverty. ... Microsoft Windows is a range of operating environments for personal computers and servers. ... In computing, an operating system (OS) is the system software responsible for the direct control and management of hardware and basic system operations. ... Microsoft Office is a suite of productivity programs created by Microsoft and developed for Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh operating systems. ... Internet Explorer, abbreviated IE or MSIE, is a proprietary web browser made by Microsoft and currently available as part of Microsoft Windows. ... Original 1984 Mac OS desktop Current 2005 Mac OS X desktop Mac OS, which stands for Macintosh Operating System, is Apple Computer’s name for the first operating systems for Macintosh computers. ... TrueType is an outline font standard originally developed by Apple Computer in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobes Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. ...

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, wide proportions, loose letter-spacing, large counters, 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. In typography, a typeface consists of a co-ordinated set of character designs. ... Frutiger, named after its Swiss designer Adrian Frutiger (born 1928), is a typeface, belonging to the sans-serif family. ... Nineteen inch (48 cm) CRT computer monitor A computer display, monitor or screen is a computer peripheral device capable of showing still or moving images generated by a computer and processed by a graphics card. ... In typography, the x-height or corpus size refers to the height of the lowercase letter x in any font, which is usually the same for a, c, e, m, n, o, r, s, u, v, w, and z. ... In typography, a counter is the space inside a partially enclosed portion of a letter such as c or s. This article is a typography stub. ... Web design is the design or designing of a web page, website or web application. ...

The Tahoma typeface is similar to Verdana but with tighter letter-spacing; other similar faces include Frutiger and Bitstream Vera Sans. Tahoma is a sans-serif typeface designed by Matthew Carter for the Microsoft Corporation in 1999. ... Frutiger, named after its Swiss designer Adrian Frutiger (born 1928), is a typeface, belonging to the sans-serif family. ... Bitstream Vera is a typeface (font) with a liberal license. ...

Criticism of Verdana

Precisely because Verdana is so readable at small sizes, some have suggested that web authors not specify the use of Verdana on a web page [1][2]. These authors argue that other typefaces like Times New Roman are hard to read at the same point size, which can cause problems when Verdana is not available. Rebuttal arguments explain that specifying a list of fonts is standard authoring practice and solves the problem. Times New Roman is a serif typeface, developed for The Times (London) newspaper in the early 1930s, designed by Stanley Morison together with Starling Burgess and Victor Lardent, and produced by the Monotype Corporation. ...

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. Combining diacritical marks are Unicode characters that are intended to modify other characters (see Diacritic). ... In computing, Unicode provides an international standard which has the goal of providing the means to encode the text of every document people want to store on computers. ... The Cyrillic alphabet (or azbuka, from the old name of the first letters) is an alphabet used to write six natural Slavic languages (Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian, and Ukrainian) and many other languages of the former Soviet Union, Asia and Eastern Europe. ... The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. ... Precomposed character is a Unicode entity that can be decomposed into a canonically equivalent string of several other characters. ... These are the astrological glyphs as most commonly used in Western Astrology A glyph is a carved figure or character, incised or in relief; a carved pictograph; hence, a pictograph representing a form originally adopted for sculpture, whether carved or painted. ...

In Verdana: (assuming you have it installed)

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

But Opera browser automatically fixes this Verdana's bug. Examples below and above look identical, combining marks are on right places. Opera is a cross-platform internet software suite consisting of a web browser, e-mail/news client, address book, newsfeed reader, IRC chat client, and download manager. ...

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)

See also

• Web core fonts

Web core fonts was a project started by Microsoft back in 1996, but later terminated (on August 2002). ...

References

• "Interview with Virginia Howlett, mother of Verdana" Retrieved September 9, 2005.

External links

• Verdana font information (Microsoft typography)
• Channel Verdana (Microsoft typography)
• Downloadable version of Verdana (Web core fonts)