Constantia is a

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 ( ...

typeface A typeface (or font family) is a design of Letter (alphabet), letters, Numerical digit, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size (e.g., 24 point), weight (e.g., light, ...

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 Ep ...

and commissioned by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

. 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-craftsma ...

’s Perpetua design. Development of the typeface began in 2003 and it was released in 2004. 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, released five years earlier, which was then the longest time span between successive releases of Microsoft W ...

. 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 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 2006, with Windows Vista. In Microsoft Office 2007, it replaced Time ...

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) or the early medieval period. After the ...

Candara Candara is a Sans-serif#Classification, humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Gary Munch and commissioned by Microsoft. It is part of the ClearType Font Collection, a suite of fonts from various designers released with Windows Vista, all star ...

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 Windo ...

and

Corbel In architecture, a corbel is a structural piece of stone, wood or metal keyed into and projecting from a wall to carry a wikt:superincumbent, bearing weight, a type of bracket (architecture), bracket. A corbel is a solid piece of material in t ...

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) 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 Ghostscript. From 20 ...

described it as likely to be “everyone’s favourite face

n the suite N, or n, is the fourteenth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages, and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''en'' (pronounced ), plural ''ens''. History ...

..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 Palatino is an old-style serif typeface designed by Hermann Zapf, initially released in 1949 by the Stempel foundry and later by other companies, most notably the Mergenthaler Linotype Company. Palatino is optimised for legibility with open ...

.” 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 but reduced in height and weight close to the surrounding lowercase letters or text figures. Small caps are used in running ...

, alternative spacing and punctuation for

all caps In typography, text or font in all caps (short for "all capitals") contains capital letters without any lowercase letters. For example: All-caps text can be seen in legal documents, advertisements, newspaper headlines, and the titles on book co ...

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, wh ...

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, wh ...

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, MS Office, or simply Office, is an office suite and family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. The first version of the Office suite, announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at CO ...

Compatibility Pack for Microsoft Windows and the Open XML File Format Converter for Mac. 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 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 International Ornithologists' Union (IOU) ado ...

.”

References

External links

*
Microsoft ClearType Font Collection
at Microsoft Typography Serif typefaces Typefaces with text figures Windows Vista typefaces Typefaces and fonts introduced in 2005 Transitional serif typefaces Typefaces designed by John Hudson ClearType Font Collection {{typ-stub