TrueType core fonts for the Web

» see microsoft.com/typography/fontpack as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

A web page in 1996 could ask for a font but could not send one. If the reader's machine did not have the face you named, the browser substituted something and your layout was somebody else's problem. There was no web font format and no way to ship type alongside a document. Microsoft's answer was to attack the problem from the other end: make a set of faces that is already on every machine, give it away, and include the Macintosh.

That was the core fonts for the Web program, run out of the Microsoft Typography group. Eleven families, each one its own download, free for anyone to install. Verdana and Georgia were the new ones, drawn by Matthew Carter specifically to survive low-resolution screens, and they are the reason a huge amount of the late-1990s web is legible at all. Comic Sans MS was in the pack too, which is how Vincent Connare's children's-book lettering escaped Windows and reached everybody else.

The rest was infrastructure. Arial, Arial Black, Courier New and Times New Roman carried the Windows defaults across, while Andale Mono, Impact, Trebuchet MS and Webdings filled out the set. Designers started writing CSS stacks that named these faces first because the probability of a hit was close to one, and that habit outlived everything else about the program.

I came online in 1998 on a modem in Turkey, and every page I read for the next decade was set in this pack. Not because anyone chose it, because it was what was there. Verdana at small sizes ran the forum skins, and Times New Roman handled everywhere nobody had specified anything at all. That eleven-file giveaway is the typography of the internet I learned to read on.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ eleven files ~

The download page was a list of self-extracting executables with their sizes printed next to them. Andale Mono for Windows 9x, NT and 2000 came as andale32.exe at 193KB, and every other family looked the same: one file, a mirror link, no account and no form to fill in. Macintosh users got .sit.hqx archives of the same faces.

The license was the interesting part, and it is still in force. You may redistribute the fonts, but only in the original installer files, with the original filenames, unmodified and unrenamed, and you may not use them to add value to a commercial product. Subsetting is allowed only for embedding in a document. A Linux distribution could therefore not ship the font files, which is why the packages that exist are downloaders rather than fonts.

~ the pull ~

On 10 August 2002 the page was still there with andale32.exe listed and the file size next to it. By 13 August Jason Kottke was writing that the downloads had gone, and Slashdot picked the story up on the 18th. The pull is usually dated to 12 August, which was the opening day of LinuxWorld in San Francisco, and the Internet Archive's record of the page does not contradict that.

What the page became is one of the plainer tombstones on the old microsoft.com. Under the heading "Web fonts program discontinued" sat a single sentence: "Microsoft's TrueType core fonts for the Web are no longer available for download from www.microsoft.com." No date on it and no explanation. A spokesman later told the press the downloads had been abused, repackaged and modified and shipped with commercial products against the EULA.

Nobody ever named the product that triggered it, and the trade show timing kept a suspicion alive for years that the distributions bundling the pack were the real target. Microsoft never said so.

~ the installer that outlived the program ~

Because the original EULA permits redistribution of the untouched installer, the files could not be recalled. A SourceForge project called corefonts collected them and still serves them, and every Debian or Ubuntu machine that wants a legally clean Arial installs ttf-mscorefonts-installer, which fetches those same 2000-era executables and unpacks them with cabextract. The program has been dead for twenty-four years and its payload ships in a current operating system this week.

The technology did eventually get solved properly. WOFF and @font-face arrived in the 2010s, a page can carry its own type now, and the reason to have eleven guaranteed faces evaporated. The faces themselves did not. Open almost any site's stylesheet and the fallback list still names Verdana or Georgia, out of a pack Microsoft gave away and then took down.

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