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Piers Cawley Practices Punditry

New Layout 9

Posted by Piers Cawley Thu, 12 Apr 2007 00:51:00 GMT

You may have noticed I’ve been tweaking. The new layout is based on Scribbish with a few CSS tweaks and some low cunning to get the three column layout working.

The basic font set is drawn from the new fonts that come with Vista: Body text is in Calibri, headings are mostly in Candara. I can’t say I’m a fan of Vista – I type this in a Windows free house – but the new font set is gorgeous. (I’ve put information on getting them installed without Vista below the fold.)

What do you think?

Update

Thanks to Simon Pride for pointing out how ugly things looked in safari – I’ve hopefully sorted out the leading issues now.

Getting the fonts

If you’re not on Vista (pretty likely I’m guessing), you can download the PowerPoint Viewer 2007 and either install it if you’re on Windows. If you’re on a Mac or Linux, you need to jump through a few more hoops. Here’s what to do on a mac with Macports installed:

  1. Download PowerPointViewer.exe
  2. From the terminal, install cabextract by doing:
    $ sudo port install cabextract
  3. Run 
    $ cabextract PowerPointViewer.exe
Extracting cabinet: PowerPointViewer.exe
  ...
All done, no errors.
$ cabextract ppviewer.cab
Extracting cabinet: ppviewer.cab
  ...
All done, no errors.
$ open *.TTF

This should open Font Book windows for the new fonts. All you have to do now is hit ‘Install Font’ for each of them and you’re home and dry. You can delete all the ppviewer detritus.

On linux, the basic cabextract steps are the same, but your Font installation steps are probably different; check your distribution’s documentation.

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  1. Simon Pride about 7 hours later:

    I just did a before & after, and it looks pretty messy until you install the MS fonts, in Safari at least. The substitutions produce very ‘Web 2.0’ overlaps and line height weirdness. I’m not sure you can depend on non-Vista users having installed fonts by circuitous routes in order for your pages not to look bad…

  2. Piers Cawley about 8 hours later:

    Thanks Simon; time for some tweaking then.

  3. Rich Lafferty about 9 hours later:

    As a data point: in Firefox, with “use my fonts instead of the specified ones” turned on (Verdana everywhere please!), everything lines up OK.

  4. Piers Cawley about 12 hours later:

    Thanks Rich. If I remember rightly, the third choice font for pretty much everything is already Verdana. Time to fix things for Safari.

  5. Sam Aaron 1 day later:

    By the time I got here, things looked fine with Safari, and now I’ve got the Vista fonts installed (thanks for the recipe Piers), it looks even nicer :-)

  6. Vidar S 1 day later:

    FYI, one of the font files is not a .ttf, but a .ttc (CAMBRIA.TTC)

  7. bleep 1 day later:

    Reading the EULA, I wouldn’t go around putting a package that cabextracts that viewer to any public repository.. It’s not 100% explicit but that EULA is pretty nasty.

  8. linuxer 1 day later:

    Thanks!
    To install fonts on linux, just move them to ~/.fonts or /usr/share/fonts .

  9. Samantha 7 days later:

    Just so you know, there is a second package on MS’s site that also contains the new Vista fonts: it’s called the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats, and is intended to allow users who have earlier versions of MS Office programs to view and edit documents created with Office 2007. The procedure for extracting the fonts from this package is similar, except that the relevant filenames are FileFormatConverters.exe and O12Conv.cab respectively.

    Not sure if the EULA for this package is more or less flexible than the one for PowerPointViewer.exe (I haven’t checked yet).

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