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 o ...

John Hudson John is a common English name and surname: * John (given name) * John (surname) John may also refer to: New Testament Works * Gospel of John, a title often shortened to John * First Epistle of John, often shortened to 1 John * Second ...

and commissioned by Microsoft. It is a transitional serif design, influenced by

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 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 ClearType is Microsoft's implementation of subpixel rendering technology in rendering text in a font system. ClearType attempts to improve the appearance of text on certain types of computer display screens by sacrificing color fidelity for addit ...

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,

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 Window ...

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 G ...

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 Perpetua...but the triangular serifs bring to mind a chisel, and the font has enough calligraphic flavor to recall Palatino.” Among other features, the design includes

small capitals In typography, small caps (short for "small capitals") are characters typeset with glyphs that resemble uppercase letters (capitals) but reduced in height and weight close to the surrounding lowercase letters or text figures. This is technicall ...

, 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 l ...

text, numbers enclosed by circles, and superscript and subscript glyphs. A transitional serif 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 PowerPoint Viewer, 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 marketi ...

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 I wish I’d thought to call it Cormorant.”

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