Here’s something to look forward to – The Design Desk at Poynter.org has a preview of six new Windows fonts:
Beginning in 2006, Microsoft says it will ship with its operating system and other software products six brand new typefaces created especially for extended on-screen reading.
The new ClearType Font Collection incorporates improved ClearType and OpenType technologies, and a boatload of research, to improve the structure and the clarity of the letter forms. Basically, that means a story will be easier to read because the letters and words won’t be as soft and mushy looking.
The Microsoft collection includes two serif, three sans serif, and a monospaced face for use in programming environments. They are intended to be text typefaces as opposed to display faces that are used in larger sizes for headlines. Some of the new fonts are suitable for print as well as on-screen applications.
Scroll to the end of the story to see a snippet of each font or look at the samples here. It’s easy to see that these were designed to be easy on the eye and crisp on the screen. People who are looking forward to Longhorn are expecting massive, killer features, but the accumulation of small touches like these have just as much impact.
Ed Bott 
These are excellent! If you purchased just one of these from a foundry like LinoType, it would cost you no less that $600-$1000 per font family. My preferred screen font is Frutiger Next LT for its readability anywhere on screen to large airport signs.
The present font in the alpha build is the crappiest font known to man. I guess Microsoft is using it as a deterrent not to get too attached to the alpha build of Longhorn (4074).
Anyway, I like the new font.
Oh, I forgot to say, my favorite fonts are Tahoma, Franklin Gothic (family).
Does anyone know what Unicode ranges will be supported in the new fonts? I use the Latin script transliteration characters in the 0100-01FF and 1E00-1EFF ranges that thankfully are included in Tahoma. It would be great to have these in a full range of type face styles.
Thanks!
You might want to try posting this question at Michael Kaplan’s blog. He’s been writing a lot about Longhorn and fonts.
These ranges are being filled out in Times New Roman and Arial and our UI fonts for Longhorn. They’re not in the C-fonts, at least not yet.
Cheers, Si