The Magic of Reading

1999
By Bill Hill, Microsoft (co-creator of ClearType)

This work has become difficult to access on the Internet due to link rot. The late author's words (at the time of this writing, Nov. 2021) are still available on this blog post: https://billhill49.wordpress.com/2008/02/08/the-magic-of-reading/

I have attempted to collect canonical resources here and document how they may be used.

The copyright for this work presumedly belongs to Microsoft Corp. rather than the public domain. This work has been freely available in the past, and today GitHub is a Microsoft property anyway, so the question of whether this repo infringes anyone's copyright is now moot.

You're welcome, Redmond! <3

Read Online

The full text can be viewed online as an HTML page in this repo.¹

Related Media

Learn more about the history of typography at Microsoft, including Bill Hill’s contributions to screen reading technology:

• John Berry, “The Faces of Microsoft: The people and the rich story of type at the first big tech company.”, Type Magazine, 29 September 2017 (archive)

I was originally drawn to this material via an audio interview with Bill Hill, conducted by Rob Conery for his and Scott Hanselman's podcast. I highly recommend the episode:

• This Developer's Life: 2.0.5 Typo, 18 September 2011

Files

osprey.doc

SHA-256: ad957cc01704e0d4ddd1e86d982e93cb0da3ada8a86961bd635c87c82062ff2b

The aforementioned blog post references this document at http://www.poynterextra.org/msfonts/osprey.doc, but this URL is defunct.

This copy was obtained from the Internet Archive.

osprey.pdf

This PDF was generated by opening osprey.doc in Microsoft Word 2016 for Mac (Version 16.16.13), removing some malformatted text boxes on page 30, and then using this program's Export to PDF feature, using the "Microsoft online service", "Best for electronic distribution and accessibility" option to maintain links from the table of contents. Unfortunately, saving the .doc file in a current version of Word destroys much of its formatting, so it is not possible to provide a .doc version with those edits.

No canonical PDF copy was ever originally produced. One has been available on scribd.com, but this was an automated and low quality conversion, and sits behind Scribd's paywall, which for some reason is a thing they are allowed to do with content they do not own.

magic.lit

SHA-256: 7b0a8e85f96dc72b355972320620f33e1c4c37d7634c317914ef1671c5c30f99

Bill's blog post also references an eBook format available from Slate.com. This appears to be the "canonical" digital distribution of the work. Again, the Slate links are defunct, but this copy was obtained from the Internet Archive.

MSReaderSetup.exe

SHA-256: d6ab507df75127c54ede7c5cba3dad0041246255a97f6e0138d4a28c1990a013

The magic.lit "canonical digital distribution" above is published for Microsoft Reader, which is eBook-reading software no longer distributed by Microsoft.

This appears to be version 2.1.1, which was released for Windows NT 4.0 through Windows ME. This version still installs and is able to read magic.lit on Windows 10 in 2019. This copy was obtained from a cnet download page.

Readerv26setupUSA.exe

SHA-256: f78b783ebcab95ac398b8ff8a3b4bda8ab5962f08ba8d6a0efdc7608d577d136

A later version of Microsoft Reader was released, but appears to be only installable on machines with the "Microsoft Touch Pack" installed. However, the Touch Pack appears to be only installable on machines with a touch interface. Pull requests accepted if someone can get this working.

This version of Microsoft Reader is no longer distributed; this copy was obtained from the Internet Archive.

Contributions

• All work originally authored by Bill Hill while at Microsoft.

• Archives compiled by NReilingh.

• 1 – HTML version contributed by EmperorXLII.