Constantia is a serif

typeface A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. There are thousands ...

Eric Gill Arthur Eric Rowton Gill, (22 February 1882 – 17 November 1940) was an English sculptor, letter cutter, typeface designer, and printmaker. Although the ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'' describes Gill as ″the greatest artist-cra ...

’s

Perpetua Perpetua and Felicity ( la, Perpetua et Felicitas) were Christian martyrs of the 3rd century. Vibia Perpetua was a recently married, well-educated noblewoman, said to have been 22 years old at the time of her death, and mother of an infant son ...

design. Development of the typeface began in 2003 and it was released in 2006. Constantia is part of the ClearType Font Collection, a suite of fonts from various designers released with

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...

. All start with the letter ''C'' to reflect that they were designed to work well with Microsoft’s ClearType text rendering system, a text rendering engine designed to make text clearer to read on LCD monitors. The other fonts in the suite are

Calibri Calibri () is a digital sans-serif typeface family in the humanist or modern style. It was designed by Luc(as) de Groot in 2002–2004 and released to the general public in 2007, with Microsoft Office 2007 and Windows Vista. In Office 2007, ...

Cambria Cambria is a name for Wales, being the Latinised form of the Welsh name for the country, . The term was not in use during the Roman period (when Wales had not come into existence as a distinct entity). It emerged later, in the medieval period, ...

, Candara,

Consolas Consolas is a monospaced typeface designed by Luc(as) de Groot. It is a part of the ClearType Font Collection, a suite of fonts that take advantage of Microsoft's ClearType font rendering technology. It has been included with Windows since Wind ...

and Corbel.

Features

Constantia was designed for either print or on-screen uses. Numerals are

text figures Text figures (also known as non-lining, lowercase, old style, ranging, hanging, medieval, billing, or antique figures or numerals) are numerals designed with varying heights in a fashion that resembles a typical line of running text, hence the ...

by default, as seen on the sample image; the font also includes lining figures as an alternate style. Reviewing it for the website ''Typographica'',

Raph Levien Raphael Linus Levien (also known as Raph Levien; born April 6, 1970) is a software developer, a member of the free software developer community, through his creation of the Advogato virtual community and his work with the free software branch of ...

described it as likely to be “everyone’s favourite face n the suite..a highly readable Roman font departing only slightly from the classical model, utit still manages to be fresh and new. It takes some inspiration from

...but the triangular serifs bring to mind a chisel, and the font has enough calligraphic flavor to recall

Palatino Palatino is the name of an Serif#Old-style, old-style serif typeface designed by Hermann Zapf, initially released in 1949 by the Stempel Type Foundry, Stempel foundry and later by other companies, most notably the Mergenthaler Linotype Company. ...

.” Among other features, the design includes small capitals, alternative spacing and punctuation for

all caps In typography, all caps (short for "all capitals") refers to text or a font in which all letters are capital letters, for example: "THIS TEXT IS IN ALL CAPS". All caps may be used for emphasis (for a word or phrase). They are commonly seen in ...

text, numbers enclosed by circles, and

superscript A subscript or superscript is a character (such as a number or letter) that is set slightly below or above the normal line of type, respectively. It is usually smaller than the rest of the text. Subscripts appear at or below the baseline, whil ...

and

subscript A subscript or superscript is a character (such as a number or letter) that is set slightly below or above the normal line of type, respectively. It is usually smaller than the rest of the text. Subscripts appear at or below the baseline, whil ...

glyphs. A

transitional serif In typography, a serif () is a small line or stroke regularly attached to the end of a larger stroke in a letter or symbol within a particular font or family of fonts. A typeface or "font family" making use of serifs is called a serif typeface ( ...

design, the design features moderate contrast between thick and thin strokes and a nearly-vertical axis. To render well in ClearType, the letters ''O'' and ''Q'' are slightly squared-off. It is distributed with Microsoft

Excel Viewer Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet developed by Microsoft for Windows, macOS, Android and iOS. It features calculation or computation capabilities, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applic ...

Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer Microsoft PowerPoint is a presentation program, created by Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin at a software company named Forethought, Inc. It was released on April 20, 1987, initially for Macintosh computers only. Microsoft acquired PowerPoi ...

, the

Microsoft Office Microsoft Office, or simply Office, is the former name of a family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. It was first announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at COMDEX in Las Vegas. Initially a ma ...

Compatibility Pack for Microsoft Windows and the Open XML File Format Converter for Mac. For use in other operating systems, such as Linux, cross-platform use and web use it is not available as a freeware. Explaining its name, Hudson wrote: “I can’t remember all the possible names I came up with, each of which ended up rejected after international trademark searches...I’d been singing some psalms during vespers, and noticed the word ''constantia''. Hey, I thought, that starts with C!” Writing in 2011, Hudson commented, “I actually don’t like the name Constantia very much, and every time I see the sea birds on the dock while I’m waiting for

the ferry ''The'' () is a grammatical article in English, denoting persons or things that are already or about to be mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in En ...

I wish I’d thought to call it

Cormorant Phalacrocoracidae is a family of approximately 40 species of aquatic birds commonly known as cormorants and shags. Several different classifications of the family have been proposed, but in 2021 the IOC adopted a consensus taxonomy of seven ge ...

.”

References

External links

*
Microsoft ClearType Font Collection
at Microsoft Typography Serif typefaces Typefaces with text figures Windows Vista typefaces Typefaces and fonts introduced in 2006 Transitional serif typefaces Typefaces designed by John Hudson ClearType Font Collection {{typ-stub