{"id":8543,"date":"2012-01-16T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-01-16T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2012\/01\/16\/why-was-there-a-font-just-for-drawing-symbols-on-buttons\/"},"modified":"2025-12-16T15:49:00","modified_gmt":"2025-12-16T23:49:00","slug":"20120116-00","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20120116-00\/?p=8543","title":{"rendered":"Why was there a font just for drawing symbols on buttons?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.henke37.cjb.net\/\"> Henke37<\/a> wonders <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2010\/07\/20\/10040074.aspx#10040363\"> why the Marlett font was introduced. Why use a font for drawing symbols on window buttons<\/a>?<\/p>\n<p>Using a font was a convenient way to have scalable graphics.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s not like Windows could&#8217;ve used VML or SVG since they hadn&#8217;t been invented yet. EMFs would have been overkill as well. Fonts were very convenient because the technology to render scalable fonts already existed and was well-established. It&#8217;s always good to build on something that has been proven, and TrueType scalable font technology proved itself very nicely in Windows\u00a03.1. TrueType has the added benefit of supporting <i>hinting<\/i>, allowing tweaks to the glyph outlines to be made for particular pixel sizes. (A feature not available in most vector drawing languages, but also a feature very important when rendering at small font sizes.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nice and scalable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[104],"class_list":["post-8543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-tipssupport"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Nice and scalable.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8543"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8543\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}