Office 2008 for Mac introduces new and updated fonts for Office users, including new default fonts throughout the suite.

The new default fonts are part of seven families of modern and beautiful typefaces in the Microsoft ClearType font collection. These cross-platform fonts look great on the Mac and in print, though each font also includes ClearType hinting for Windows screen display.

Calibri, designed by Dutch type designer Luc(as) de Groot, is a default font for Word, PowerPoint text, and for Entourage HTML messages. A modern sans-serif font with subtle rounded terminals and corners, Calibri’s proportions retain strong readability in tight lines of small or large text.


(These screenshots are from my MacBook Pro, but you'll need to see these fonts rendered in Office on your screen for true fidelity.)

Cambria, designed by another Dutch designer, Monotype Imaging’s Jelle Bosma, is also a default font for Word. This serif font has even spacing and proportions with strong diagonal hairlines, vertical serifs and restrained form, lending itself well to business documents, email, and web design.



With Cambria and Calibri, we bring forward the legacy of elegant and readable serif and sans serif fonts for Word’s text.

Consolas is a monospaced font, also designed by Luc, used as the default for plain text messages in Entourage. The font is designed with proportions closer to normal text than traditional monospaced fonts, allowing for more comfortable reading of extended text onscreen, for plain text email, or for reading and programming code.



Three other fonts complete the ClearType font collection for Latin text in Office 2008. Corbel is a sans serif, crisp font with elegant curves, designed to give an uncluttered and clean appearance.Candara brings additional flair to sans serif choices with high curves, wide apertures, and a lively attitude. Constantia is a wedge-serif and features small x-height and long extenders. Each of these families retains readability onscreen and on the printed page, and include italics, bold, and bold italic styles.



Meiryo is the Japanese typeface member of the ClearType font collection in Office 2008. Meiryo is a sans serif type with open, well-proportioned forms, retaining clarity at small sizes and in tight spacing. Meiryo includes both Japanese glyphs designed by Eiichi Kono and the C&G type foundry and Latin glyphs designed by Matthew Carter. Also, MS Mincho and MS Gothic, both fixed-width and proportional, have been updated with additional Japanese range support in Office 2008.



The ClearType font collection has been designed to work together well, and extra attention was made to design the non-Latin scripts in parallel with the Latin sets. You’ll see this in Meiryo with the Japanese and Latin text sharing harmonizing alignments and weight. Each font includes Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic script support.

You will find these new fonts frequently used in Office Themes. Themes bring a unified look and feel to documents by providing a set of fonts, colors, graphics effects, and slide layouts (for PowerPoint) to Office documents. Other fonts new to Office 2008 were also included to add variety to the look and feel of Office Themes, including: Franklin Gothic Book and Medium, Gill Sans MT, Lucida Sans Unicode, Perpetua, and Twentieth Century MT.

If you own Office 2004 for Mac, the six Latin fonts are installed with the Open XML File Format Converter for Mac 1.0 to provide additional layout fidelity when opening files that were authored in Office 2007 for Windows or Office 2008 for Mac. You must have Office 2004 for Mac installed on your boot volume for these fonts to be installed.

If you’re working with Office 2008, you’ve been using some of the new fonts already, but I encourage you to take a tour and get to know the unique look and feel of all of them, you’ll like what you see while adding attractive choices to your work and designs.