Segoe UI gets improvements in Windows 8

By Descartes
in The Fast Ring (Insider Previews)

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Descartes

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Something I noticed while looking at my system calendar was that the "2" looked a little quirky - way more curved than I remembered it. I've noticed the lack of serifs in "I" and "1" before but quickly assumed that the base variant had it, and the light version didn't... a quick search for screenshots and a comparison revealed that It indeed changed.

I think it's fantastic, because the "1" always looked a bit off for me in an otherwise sans-serif font :p

Your thoughts?

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Descartes

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I agree! It's been my favourite screen font even over OSX's Lucida Grande for a while now. I think it's really elegant while also doing it's job very well.

Then there's Ubuntu, which also does a fantastic job as a screen font, but it's not nearly the same stylistically and not quite my cup of tea.

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Descartes

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  On 02/06/2012 at 22:34, contextfree said:

Something else I noticed is that in the RP they even use ligatures (combining certain letter combinations together, like "fi" and "fl") in UI text - I don't think that was in CP and in fact I'm not sure I've ever seen that in an OS before.

Hey that's quite interesting, I've never the use of ligatures in the RP myself. Do you have any screenshots?

EDIT: Gee, apparently the change occured back in March even, so the new version was already present in CP. How could I have not noticed?

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Dot Matrix

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  On 02/06/2012 at 22:36, Phouchg said:

Hell, now looks like Segoe WP, a font of the same family. I question integrity of anybody who says these changes are subtle.

And all in all it makes me wonder even more what kind of brain-eating plague is loose in Redmond lately.

Oh geez, even a font change is generating hate. :rolleyes:

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Descartes

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Out of the bad things, I can't help but notice how weird "R" and "P" look next to each other. Not sure if this is also present in the older version, though - you don't see that particular combination of letters next to each other too often, and if you do, it's usually referring to the testing version of the next big thing :p:

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  On 02/06/2012 at 22:48, Dot Matrix said:

Oh geez, even a font change is generating hate. :rolleyes:

The great thing about opinions is that anyone can have their own.

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mzta cody

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  On 02/06/2012 at 22:33, bjoswald said:

Wouldn't mind having this on Windows 7.

You can. If you've copied the Win 8 fonts somewhere (or have them on another partition along with Win 8), just use them to replace the existing ones in Win 7's Font folder. Windows 7 will permit you to do so, it'll just ask if you want to replace the existing font.

Or, if you have the installation ISO, you can use 7-zip to extract the fonts (and whatever else) from the install image.

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Ambroos

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They should have named it differently. Segoe UI Metro for example, anything really. Different fonts with the same name are never a good thing for document portability. I like using Segoe UI in documents, it's quite a good font if you're not going for print.

I'd also like to see it compared to Zegoe UI, they might very well be related.

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Descartes

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  On 02/06/2012 at 23:17, Ambroos said:

They should have named it differently. Segoe UI Metro for example, anything really. Different fonts with the same name are never a good thing for document portability. I like using Segoe UI in documents, it's quite a good font if you're not going for print.

I'd also like to see it compared to Zegoe UI, they might very well be related.

I have to disagree. These are rather subtle changes, I'd even call them fixes. As long as they don't change the glyphs' width, it's unlikely to break anything. Versioning exists for this reason precisely.

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Phouchg

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  On 02/06/2012 at 22:48, Dot Matrix said:

Oh geez, even a font change is generating hate. :rolleyes:

Hate is what makes me get up in the morning, sir.

  On 02/06/2012 at 23:40, Marcin Kurek said:

Possibly because then they'd have to include both for backwards compatibility's sake, and that just seems a poorer decision to me.

Backwards compatibility is what has defined Windows ecosystem so far, and, among other things, maintained its dominance among consumer systems.

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Max Norris

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  On 03/06/2012 at 00:03, Auroka said:
Is it possible to switch the old Segoe UI with the new one on Windows 7?

Sure, just install it like any other font and when it asks if you want to replace/overwrite, say yes.

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