Posted by italophil 12/10/2025
The decision to abandon Calibri on the grounds of it being a so-called “wasteful diversity font” is both amusing and regrettable. Calibri was specifically designed to enhance readability on modern computer screens and was selected by Microsoft in 2007 to replace Times New Roman as the default font in the Office suite. There were sound reasons for moving away from Times: Calibri performs exceptionally well at small sizes and on standard office monitors, whereas serif fonts like Times New Roman tend to appear more distorted. While serif fonts are well-suited to high-resolution displays, such as those found on modern smartphones, on typical office screens the serifs introduce unnecessary visual noise and can be particularly problematic for users with impaired vision, such as older adults.
Professional typography can be achieved with both serif and sans-serif fonts. However, Times New Roman—a typeface older than the current president—presents unique challenges. Originally crafted in Great Britain for newspaper printing, Times was optimised for paper, with each letterform meticulously cut and tested for specific sizes. In the digital era, larger size drawings were repurposed as models, resulting in a typeface that appears too thin and sharp when printed at high quality.
Serif fonts are often perceived as more traditional, but they are also more demanding to use effectively. While a skilled typographer can, in theory, produce excellent results with Times, using it in its default digital form is not considered professional practice.
Calibri, by contrast, incorporates extensive spacing adjustments and language-specific refinements. The digital version of Times New Roman, developed in the early days of computing, offers only minimal kerning and letter-pair adjustments. This is especially evident in words set in all capitals—such as “CHICAGO”—where the spacing is inconsistent: the letters “HIC” are tightly packed, while “CAG” are spaced too far apart. Microsoft cannot rectify these issues without altering the appearance of existing documents.
Would be cool to see google support this for at least all the fonts in Google Fonts' library, since they're already well supported web fonts.
And that brings us back to these ugly fonts. Because their shapes are
unfamiliar, because they are less legible, they make the mind work a little
harder; the slight frisson of Comic Sans wakes us up or at least prevents us
from leaning on the usual efficiencies. “The complex fonts . . . function
like an alarm,” Alter writes. They signal “that we need to recruit additional
mental resources to overcome that sense of difficulty.”
If Rubio read Republic then he's just demonstrated that he'd not have understood it.
When did Germany impeach Hitler?
Also, Donald Trump has already been impeached as many times all other Presidents combined.
(disclaimer: I am Dutch).
Well then I suppose it’s only appropriate to say: Goede fhtagn
If you cannot say it then let me: that spiteful, revengeful petty-minded fuckwit needs to be told that it's a fucked decision of the first order, and that someone in his position has no right nor the time to be involved in grinding the minutiae of state so fine.
Heaven help us, please!
Midterms are coming. You know what to do.
Damn, the diversity of people one can meet here on HN continues to amaze me. Even after almost 13 years.
> The decision to abandon Calibri on the grounds of it being a so-called “wasteful diversity font” is both amusing and regrettable.
The cruelty (in this case, against people with visual impairments) is the actual point, as always, and the appearance of "going back to the good old times" is the visual that's being sold to the gullibles.
Calibri is a high-quality font that works as body text, but it's cold.
Times NR on paper is fine, on screen it is not fine unless you have a high resolution display.
Being the default in MSOffice also doesn’t help with professionalism as it makes it even more pedestrian.
Within this environment the decision to eschew the font that was expertly designed for present needs in favor of one designed in the past for different ones makes perfect sense.
Can he read? No doubt he can read some. I can't say he's illiterate. But functionally, he's nowhere near the reading and comprehension skills of what we should expect from a national leader.
That’s why Microsoft no longer sets it as default, and it is expected to be phased out by institutional consumers.
Calibri served its time. But it’s time is over.
This reads like your CEO is mixing an argument against serifs with an argument against Times specifically. Later on they make a case against Times' lack of support for more modern features in digital fonts, which is a fine argument, but a question comes to mind: is the solution a sans-serif font?
It seems to me upon reading the article that Rubio's staff, or Rubio himself, is being overly specific with the font and I suspect that, being uninformed, what they really want is a serif font rather than Times New Roman, specifically. Maybe I'm wrong.
In any case, I'd like for you/your CEO to make it clearer, if you will: do you believe official government communications should use a sans-serif font altogether or is it just a problem with Times? Or both?
On a more personal note, is there any serif font you'd suggest as an alternative?
Thank you. (And sorry if I read this wrong.)
What they really want is to smear something the previous administration did as DEIA, woke, wasteful, and anti-conservative (ie: change).
TNR is awful and anyone who actually cares about serifs knows there are better options.
> ...according to an internal department cable seen by Reuters...
The jab at the DEIA is petty, sure. But if the only intent was to smear them, why didn't they even announce it publicly? It was the choice of Reuters and HN to make an MS Office font change(!) a big deal.
I translate things like "DEI", "woke" and "anti-conservative" as "basic kindness"
> Trump envoy Witkoff reportedly advised Kremlin official on Ukraine peace deal
A more dignified Secretary of State would have resigned when this news surfaced.
I remain impressed at the number of longstanding Republican politicians that have been willing to sacrifice their dignity and likely their political career on the Trump altar. It is a one-way trip for their credibility, and when Trump is gone what are they going to do?
The only interesting right wing politician to me right now is MTG. And that's an odd position to find myself in. She is a clown, but suddenly she seems much more real for a moment. Like we might have caught a glimpse of the actual person. I am faintly curious how her political career shapes up over the next few years (assuming her resignation does happen and is not the actual end of her ambitions).
What a waste of government time and spending.
It is objectively more concerning and “absurd”, regardless of “team”, that Blinken arbitrarily introduced fragmentation by adding an additional font to official government communications when a convention had been established across government to use Times New Roman.
I'm also interested to hear your thoughts on the arbitrariness of Microsoft's decision to switch to Calibri in 2007 - imagine the "fragmentation" that must have caused across the business world!
Blinken made no public statements on this until he was asked about it. He did not come out and say for example, "For too long, the vision impaired community have been discriminated against by the systemic bias via the use of Times New Roman. Today we are taking action to change this and restore the dignity of those this font has long oppressed", but Rubio just did exactly this. For all I can tell the actual decision was a recommendation made by an internal team doing an accessibility review.
Wild. I'm curious now if someone has an ordered list of fonts from the gayest to the straightest.
You sound like someone saying we shouldn’t have ramps and elevators because crutches exist.
If it's on a screen in a browser, probably. If it's printed, or on a display not under a reader's control, probably not.
FWIW, I'm partially split. I generally prefer sans-serif overall - have for decades. I think I slightly prefer serif for some printed material visually, but... when I actually have to engage and read it, for long periods, I think I tend to opt for sans-serif. Noticed this on my kindle years ago, and kindle reader now - I usually swap to sans-serif options (I think it's been my default for a while).
I think Calibri is arguably a better font, to me the bigger issue is the commercial license used in govt works.
The wild thing is that even if you don’t respect the switch to Calibri on the grounds that it doesn’t really benefit anyone and is therefore wasted effort for little or no gain, the decision to switch back is a decision to double that wasted effort.
That said, it’s clear from the daring fireball story linked in the thread that this is being super overblown and Rubio isn’t really making an argument that Calibri is wasting money. This is an arbitrary decision.
https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/full_text_of_marco_rubio_...
of course simply comparing years without a control we have no way of knowing the effect of the change (well, if we were to look at the previous years at least we could see if this 145K difference was somehow significant or not)
Sadly way more informative than our traditional outlets.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelt...
This particular thing was not all that common between Presidents who succeed normally by election. I think the most recent was Robert Gates serving as SecDef across the Bush II/Obama transition, before that there were five kept across the Reagan/Bush I transition, and no more in the post-WWII period.
(It’s true that the pettiness level in this Administration is unprecedented, but this is not a valid example.)
It's so utterly juvenile and unprofessional. The kind of thing a petulant twelve year-old does for attention.
Which is stupid, of course, especially considering that sans-serif fonts improve readability on screens for most people, not for a minority.
EDIT: extraneous "don't" in the middle of a sentence
There's no end game in particular.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelt...
I guess people like to stay asleep.
Will be a rough awakening
I used to believe that people would wake up, but that does not seem to be what happens. They are just herded around by the next dog that comes along.
If I say I bought a yellow car, nobody cares. If I say I bought a yellow car to troll the libtards, now everybody is mad even though what I said makes no sense and it all has little consequence anyway.
Was the switch to Calibri in 2023 also a waste of time and money, or are font switches only bad when the Trump administration does them?
> A cable dated December 9 sent to all U.S. diplomatic posts said that typography shapes the professionalism of an official document and Calibri is informal compared to serif typefaces. > "To restore decorum and professionalism to the Department’s written work products and abolish yet another wasteful DEIA program, the Department is returning to Times New Roman as its standard typeface," the cable said.
I don't read that purely as an "anti-woke" move, why did Reuters only highlight that part and not the bit about professionalism? I do indeed agree that serifs look more authoritative.
The _second paragraph_ of TFA gives a reason for the introduction. Please explain how you came to the conclusion that the change was arbitrary.
I get that people’s biases make accepting reality difficult, but this will all end poorly if you can’t even just be objective on basic things like it being detrimental for one single department of the federal government to arbitrarily change rather significant things like the official font, even worn text, communication is the primary work product and format.
Why did you ignore all the other aspects and simply latch onto something you thought was a loophole because you cannot objectively adapt a relevant definition?
This is not reddit. You should have higher standards for yourself.
Given the complete absence of either in the current administration, this is clearly not the real reason. So “woke” is the only explanation left.
Associating TNR with authoritarianism would not even be historically accurate, because many authoritarians pushed to simplify writing (Third Reich, Soviets, CCP); if anything, TNR looks _conservative_, which is probably the look that Rubio is going for.
https://daringfireball.net/misc/2025/12/state-department-ret...
I don't usually go back to comments from seven days ago, but I missed the full memo being on DF. The sideswipe at the previous administration is childish, sure. But the way in which Reuters has portrayed this memo is even more shocking to me after reading it. Holy culture war partisanship, batman.
I'd love to know how that was determined. Given that:
"If different fonts are best for different people, you might imagine that the solution to the fonts problem would be a preference setting to allow each user to select the font that’s best for them.
This solution will not work, for two reasons. First, previous research on user-interface customization has found that most users don’t use preference settings, but simply make do with the default.
Second, and worse, users don’t know what’s best for them, so they can’t choose the best font, even if they were given the option to customize their fonts. In this study, participants read 14% faster in their fastest font (314 WPM, on average) compared to their most preferred font (275 WPM, on average)"
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/best-font-for-online-readin...
What you actually want to compare speed in the most preferred font to, to show that individual choice is or is not better than one-size-fits-all dictate, is speed in the font that would be chosen as the universal choice by whichever mechanism would be used (to show it is universally better, show that there is no universal font choice that would lead to the average user being faster than with their preferred font.)
All comparing each individual's preferred font to each individual's fastest is showing that an individualized test-based optimized font choice is better for reading speed than individual preference font choice, which I guess is interesting if you are committed to individualized choices, but not if the entire question is whether individual or centralized choices are superior.
The (ex-)scientist in me is looking for a controlled study, ideally published in a peer reviewed journal, looking at - how can I put this - actual data.
60s of Googling gave me this
The effect of a specialized dyslexia font, OpenDyslexic, on reading rate and accuracy https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5629233/
"A single-subject alternating treatment design was used to investigate the extent to which a specialized dyslexia font, OpenDyslexic, impacted reading rate or accuracy compared to two commonly used fonts when used with elementary students identified as having dyslexia. OpenDyslexic was compared to Arial and Times New Roman in three reading tasks: (a) letter naming, (b) word reading, and (c) nonsense word reading. Data were analyzed through visual analysis and improvement rate difference, a nonparametric measure of nonoverlap for comparing treatments. Results from this alternating treatment experiment show no improvement in reading rate or accuracy for individual students with dyslexia, as well as the group as a whole. While some students commented that the font was “new” or “different”, none of the participants reported preferring to read material presented in that font. These results indicate there may be no benefit for translating print materials to this font."
Advocacy for people with disabilities is important, but actual data may be even more important.
The differences between individuals which perform better with different fonts may have nothing to do with the intrinsic qualities of the fonts but may be determined only by the previous experience of the tested subjects with the tested fonts or with other fonts that are very similar to the tested fonts.
Only if you measure reading speed differences between fonts with which the tested subjects are very familiar, e.g. by having read or written a variety of texts for one year or more, you can conclude that the speed differences may be caused by features of the font, and if the optimal fonts are different between users, then this is a real effect.
There are many fonts that have some characters which are not distinctive enough, so they have only subtle differences. When you read texts with such fonts you may confuse such characters frequently and deduce which is the correct character only from the context, causing you to linger over a word, but after reading many texts you may perceive automatically the inconspicuous differences between characters and read them correctly without confusions, at a higher speed.
Many older people, who have read great amounts of printed books, find the serif typefaces more legible, because these have been traditionally preferred in book texts. On the other hand, many younger people, whose reading experience has been provided mainly by computer/phone screens, where sans-serif fonts are preferred because of the low resolution of the screens, find sans-serif fonts more legible. This is clearly caused only by the familiarity with the tested fonts and does not provide information about the intrinsic qualities of the fonts.
Moreover, the resolution of most displays, even that of most 4k monitors, remains much lower than the resolution of printed paper and there are many classic typefaces that are poorly rendered on most computer monitors. To compare the legibility of the typefaces, one should use only very good monitors, so that some typefaces should not be handicapped. Otherwise, one should label the study as a study of the legibility as constrained by a certain display resolution. At low enough display resolutions, the fonts designed especially to avoid confusions between characters, like many of the fonts intended for programming, should outperform any others, while at high display resolutions the results may be very different.
I'm afraid I assumed this particular part was a joke, but having read it several times I'm no longer sure ...
Assuming it's not a joke, what would you suggest to readers of content using any particular font who don't have "very good monitors"? What are they supposed to do instead? Not attempt to read the content? Save up for a better monitor?
After reading the complete paper, I have seen that the study is much worse than I had supposed based on its abstract.
This study is typical for the font legibility studies made by people without knowledge about typography. I find annoying that such studies are very frequent. Whoever wants to make such a study should consult some specialist before doing another useless study.
The authors claim that a positive feature of their study is the great diversity of fonts that they have tested: 16 fonts.
This claim is very false. All their fonts are just very minor variations derived from 4 or 5 basic types and even those basic types have only few relevant differences from Times New Roman and Arial.
All their fonts do not include any valuable innovation in typeface design made after WWII, and most fonts do not include any valuable innovation made after WWI. They include a geometric sans serif, which is a kind of typeface created after WWI, but this kind of typefaces is intended for packaging and advertising, not for bulk text, so its inclusion has little importance for a legibility test.
I would classify all their 16 typefaces as "typefaces that suck badly" from the PoV of legibility and I would never use any of them in my documents.
Obviously, other people may not agree with my opinion, but they should be first exposed to more varied kinds of typefaces, before forming an opinion about what they prefer, and not only to the low-diversity typefaces bundled with Windows.
After WWII, even if the (bad in my opinion) sans-serif typefaces similar to Helvetica/Arial have remained the most widespread, which have too simplified letter shapes, so that many letters are ambiguous, there have appeared also other kinds of sans-serif typefaces, which combine some of the features of older sans-serif typefaces with some of the features of serif typefaces.
In my opinion, such hybrid typefaces (e.g. Palatino Sans, Optima Nova, FF Meta, TheSans, Trajan Sans) are better than both the classic serif typefaces and the classic sans-serif typefaces.
The purpose of that research study wasn't to survey the entire history of sans-serif design(!), it was to answer a fairly focused question: does OpenDyslexic improve reading for the population it claims(or claimed) to help?
The answer appears to be no.
That may be a case of "I hate reading this font so much I don't want to do more than skim over the text."
Keep in mind that the transgenic mouse breeding program used to make lab mice for research got defined because the President claimed Democrats were so woke they were funding "trans" mice research.
Half of what they are doing is virtue signalling and posturing without any real understanding of what they are doing.
> To understand the effects of feminizing sex hormone therapy on vaccination, we propose to develop a mouse model of gender-affirming hormone therapy, assess its relevance to human medicine through singe-cell transcriptome studies, and test the immune responses of “cis” vs. “trans” mice to a HIV vaccine.
https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10849830#descriptio...
The trouble is, if the things are called as what they are, you cant say "both sides are the same". Because one side is promoting cruelty and the other is not.
> says things they don't believe to curry favour
If you do not believe that trans people should be beating up, but say so to look manly to your boss, you still promoted beating of trans.
2.) About Kirk specifically, liberals signaled "murder is bad" hard and frequently. Meanwhile Kirk himself signaled hatred.
3.) Meanwhile, Trump, Vance and Hegseth are constantly signaling "murder is good actually, if we are doing it" and "bullying is manly thing to do".
And that is exactly why it is userful to distinguish between "good thing signal" and "bad thing signal".
-----------
Conservatives have the option to signal good things. They make different choice.
I notice that people are largely staying pretty quiet about the politics of the Kirk murder since shortly after it happened. I assume it is because, to the extent there is evidence of any ideology, groyper fits as well as leftist. Maybe better, even.
In my time as a righteous woke progressive, it eventually dawned on me that the other side was just as likely to believe in the righteousness of their cause, even if I couldn't understand their reasoning for it. It also dawned on me that the righteous folks on the other side of the divide likely see my beliefs and the reasoning by which I arrived at them as equally baffling.
If both sides believe fully in their righteousness, and see their opponents as wholly unreasonable, then we will end up in a non-religious holy war.
The only way to recover is for both sides to turn down their righteousness.
One small step to do that is to at least try to understand--without agreeing--why the people with whom you disagree hold their beliefs, which ones are inflexible and which are mutable.
The problem is that we've seen what this kind of "righteousness" leads to (gas chambers, The Final Solution, World War II) and yet we're heading down the same road. There is no reasoning with Nazis.
Yes, obviously, you have stated this before. You are clear on that. I agree with you.
What you don't seem to have done (because you keep saying you don't understand why it would be a virtue) is steelmanned the argument of the other side. Only by doing that can you 1) understand why their plan would be considered virtuous by them, 2) understand what the costs of the calibri font are, and 3) make an informed and rational decision.
Maybe you're right and there is nothing that supports their decision except the parts you see as cruelty, but my suspicion is that you havent investigated that.
However, I think it's a mistake to do so as you cannot deal with fascism by discussion, reasoned argument and logic. When a country starts rounding people up and putting them in concentration camps (it's not a prison if people are kept there without due process) then clearly the fascists have taken over. Instead of playing their game of disingenuous arguments (which are mainly used for distraction and to influence the gullible), their behaviour needs to be called out for what it is.
It's like with Musk's Nazi salutes - any attempt to rationalise that as anything else (e.g. "he's autistic", "sending his heart") is a lie and in my opinion, they deliberately do things which are unjustifiable just to see who will show loyalty and follow the party line no matter how ridiculous it is.
A font change is fascism?
And don't get me started about the current meddling of the executive in my private life? I haven't had a more intrusive administration since living in Singapore.
Changing it back is the exact definition of performative work.
Edit: 19 years ago. Almost 2 decades ago!
You're behind. They've since changed it again. Calibri is no longer the default for Microsoft Office, it's now Aptos. That change was a few years ago.
More proof that the government chose correctly.
Another issue is due to the font size and font metrics, how much space it will take up on the page, to be small enough to avoid wasting paper and ink but also not too small to read.
So, there are multiple issues in choosing the fonts; however, Times New Roman and Calibri are not the only two possible choices.
Maybe the government should make up their own (hopefully public domain) font, which would be suitable for their purposes (and avoiding needing proprietary fonts), and use that instead.
They have, public sans, courtesy of USWDS, and it does distinguish between l and I with a little hook/spur on lowercase el
https://public-sans.digital.gov/
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Public+Sans?preview.text=1...
The glyph repertoire is a bit limited, though.
So why fonts are being managed by Rubio and not the Chief Design Officer is anyone's guess
https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/08/fact-sheet-pr...
With such inspiring copy as “What's the biggest brand in the world? If you said Trump, you're not wrong. But what's the foundation of that brand? One that's more globally recognized than practically anything else. It's the nation…where he was born. It's the United States of America.” how can you go wrong?
Surely it should be "...that mediocrity in..." or even "...that mediocre government..." or even "...that being mediocre in...". All of those are better!
edit: this text is a mess. "It's time to upgrade, and fix the nation's digital potholes." That comma is nonsense.
I assume they wanted to look smart in the sense "look at us, we used the oxford comma" without actually understanding that the oxford comma needs 3 or more elements listed to be an actual oxford comma.
> What's the biggest brand in the world? If you said Trump, you're not wrong.
This is beyond satire by now, it reminds me of Idi Amin and his official title:
His full self-bestowed title ultimately became: "His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, CBE, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular"
The Hatch Act is a law, but is effectively dead under this administration as it is never enforced and often violated brazenly.
I expect the leaders of a government deciding on matters that have a real impact on people's live, not on stuff that from a practical point of view is totally irrelevant.
The modern era we live in has far, far too much of this attitude. It's the same force eroding craftsmanship, attention to detail, and human dignity.
I find it quite reasonable for someone to care about the presentation of official government communications.
And just so we are clear, I also think Rubio is a horrible person.
a) It's a smoke screen. Do something bombastic and provocative so that the opposition chews on that while something else more "important" passes undetected.
b) Nah, he's just stupid.
What else should be decided on on the highest level: spacing, padding, allowance of the Oxford comma?
It is useful that somebody thinks about that stuff, just not the highest level of the government.
That's like the CEO of Microsoft having meeting about coding conventions, space vs tabs, variable name format etc.
Gates absolutely did care when Windows products were bad.
No. Those things aren't exposed to the public. But the UI is:
___
Bill Gates:
So I went to Windows update. Windows Update decides I need to download a bunch of controls. (Not) just once but multiple times where I get to see weird dialog boxes.
Doesn’t Windows update know some key to talk to Windows?
Then I did the scan. This took quite some time and I was told it was critical for me to download 17megs of stuff.
This is after I was told we were doing delta patches to things but instead just to get 6 things that are labeled in the SCARIEST possible way I had to download 17meg.
So I did the download. That part was fast. Then it wanted to do an install. This took 6 minutes and the machine was so slow I couldn’t use it for anything else during this time.
What the heck is going on during those 6 minutes? That is crazy. This is after the download was finished.
Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night — why should I reboot at that time?
So I did the reboot because it INSISTED on it. Of course that meant completely getting rid of all my Outlook state.
So I got back up and running and went to Windows Update again. I forgot why I was in Windows Update at all since all I wanted was to get Moviemaker.
So I went back to Microsoft.com and looked at the instructions. I have to click on a folder called WindowsXP. Why should I do that? Windows Update knows I am on Windows XP.
> – The US has the most qualified intelligence organizations in the world at its disposal. Both the CIA and the FBI have been politicized under the current regime. I find it difficult to see how we will be able to maintain the trusting cooperation we have had with the US in the past after this.
The actions of the current administration speaks far louder than any font ever could, and it's tearing down decades of good will and trust.
The CIA and FBI were politicised well before the current regime. If you live in the US you will be aware of the Russiagate hoax.
"Use a better font in all documnts from now on"
There you go.
A big part of leadership is conveying priorities. This says "What's important isn't Israel, Venezuela, Russia/Ukraine, China, it's that you used Calibri in compiling a document." It is the very definition of form over substance.
I'm imagining a scenario in which the President of the United States is doing his usual sort of diplomatic outreach, consisting of waffling incoherently about things he's heard on TV that he doesn't like about their country. At one point he loses his train of thought and starts bragging about how well he's doing in cognitive adequacy tests. The diplomats are waiting until the bit where they get to flatter and bribe him at the end, the bit where he usually reverses his foreign policy, so long as they can get him to understand what they're actually asking from him. One of them speculates whether it's even possible that half the country is actually dumber than this guy.
A staffer wearing a MAGA baseball cap sidles up to them with some briefing notes. And its just impossible not to notice the notes are typeset in the very same venerable font that was once used as the default for Windows 9x.
The diplomats are stunned. No sans serif wokeness here. The typeface exudes heritage and gravitas. At last they realize what a very serious adminstration they're dealing with.
Sometimes there is no problem because the words or links containing ambiguous letters can be copied and pasted. Other times there is an annoying problem because either the stupid designer has disabled copying (or like in the output of Google and some other search engines, copying does not copy the visible text, but a link that cannot be used in a different context, outside the browser), or because I want to write on my computer a link or name that I have received on my phone.
But sans-serif fonts are certainly the prime offenders of rendering a lower-case L in place of the capital "i".
Only on computer screens it is possible to confuse serifs with crossbars, because of the very low resolution, which forces the increase of the width of a serif to 1 pixel, possibly making it as wide as a crossbar.
To convince yourself that capital I has serifs and not crossbars, just look at high-resolution photos of some Roman imperial inscriptions, like that on Trajan's column, which are the gold standard for the design of the capital letters in serif fonts.
Most letters of the Latin script are made of 3 elements, thick lines, thin lines and serifs. The width ratio between the thick lines and the thin lines is called the contrast of the font.
Serif fonts normally have a higher contrast and sans serif fonts not only have no serifs, but they also have no contrast or only a low contrast.
Serifs are even thinner than the thin lines (which include some of the crossbars), except in sans serif fonts (which have no serifs) and slab serifs fonts (where the serifs are as thick as the thin lines).
Both the sans serif and the slab serif fonts are fonts typical for the 19th century after the Napoleonian wars, when they were used mainly for advertising, where they attracted attention due to their anomalous serifs and they also allowed a lower cost by using cheap paper and printing machines, which would not have rendered well the standard serif fonts.
In several programmer fonts, where most characters are sans serif, a few characters are made slab serif, i.e. with serifs that are as thick as a crossbar, with the purpose of distinguishing them clearly from similar characters. Thus capital I is made with thick serifs looking like crossbars, even if that is not the standard capital I shape. The reason is less to distinguish it from l, which should have a low hook even in sans-serif typefaces, but to distinguish it better from vertical bar, which is important in programming languages.
Moreover, because such programmer fonts are fixed-pitch, a few narrow characters have slab serifs that do not exist in variable-pitch fonts, in order to avoid excessive areas of white space between letters. Such slab serifs added for blackening are put at the top of the small i, j and l letters, not only on capital I (but on the small letters the slab serifs are unilateral, not bilateral, like on capital I). Such extra slab serifs on the narrow characters are inherited from the type-writing machines, where they had the purpose to diminish the pressure of the hammer hitting the paper, to avoid making holes in the paper.
Among Microsoft typefaces, Georgia would have been much better than Times New Roman, especially when read on displays, but even when printed.
There are of course even better choices, but Georgia is a familiar typeface for most people, it is similar enough to Times New Roman and the older versions of Georgia are free to use by anybody.
Georgia is not as condensed as Times New Roman, but here Times New Roman is the anomaly, as it is more condensed than a normal font, for the purpose of fitting within narrow newspaper columns.
From Windows 3.0 to Windows 98, I have used Times New Roman as my main text font in documents, because Windows did not include anything better, but immediately after the introduction of the superior Georgia I replaced Times New Roman with it for some years, until eventually I stopped relying on the bundled typefaces and I have bought some typefaces that I liked more, for use in all my documents. (Windows 3.0 did not have yet TTF fonts, with which the licensed Times New Roman was introduced later, but it already had a metrically equivalent Times font).
Only when used in a context where they can be confused. This is a situation where HN is going to give bad advice. Programmers care deeply about that stuff (i.e. "100l" is a long-valued integer literal in C and not the number 1001). Most people tend not to, and there is a long tradition of fonts being a little ambiguous in that space.
But yes, don't use Calibri in your editor.
Except the whole rationale for going to Calibri in the first place was that it was supposedly more accessible due to being easier to OCR.
Using a sans serif font generally helps anyone with difficulty distinguishing letters so dyslexic, low vision, aging vision etc. individuals. It's not just for digital OCR.
So far as I'm aware, there is very little actual evidence to support this oft-repeated claim. It all seems to lead back to this study of 46 individuals, the Results section of which smells of p-hacking.
https://dyslexiahelp.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/go...
Yeah because normal people never have to deal with alphanumeric strings...
Natural language tends to have a high degree of disambiguating redundancy and is used to communicate between humans, who are good at making use of that. Programming languages have somewhat less of disambiguating redundancy (or in extreme cases almost none), and, most critically, are used to communicate with compilers and interpreters that have zero capacity to make use of it even when it is present.
This makes "letter looks like a digit that would rarely be used in a place where both make sense" a lot more of a problem for a font used with a programming language than a font used for a natural language.
El confusion is absolutely a problem for regular people.
I said alphanumeric strings not natural language. Things like order codes, authentication codes, license numbers, etc.
Not that official State Department communication is mostly “legal language” as distinct from more general formal use of natural language to start with.
Why design an intentionally ambiguous font? There is only downside to it.
And people like it this way! So that's why we design fonts like this.
Oh really? People have a mechanism for reporting that? And they'll turn away from products using fonts with properly-demarcated capitals?
Ladies and gentlemen, witness the "argumentum ad populum" fallacy.
So what are you supposed to when you're typing along and suddenly you find yourself in such a context? Switch the font of that one occurrence? That document? Your whole publishing effort?
Capital "i"s without crossbars aren't capital "i"s. They're lower-case Ls. Any font that doesn't recognize this should be rejected.
You have asserted this at least thrice in the past thirty minutes. What makes you feel so strongly about it? "Rejected" for what purpose? Do you understand that you've just trashed Helvetica, to take a famous example?
Oh wait, I trashed hallowed Helvetica? The Lord's font? The font used on the tablets Moses carried down from Mount Sinai? OMG whatever shall I do.
Meanwhile, the question stands.
There’s a few dozen off the shelf fonts that would work for 99.99% of people.
For those who it doesn’t work, deal with it. It’s a font. Or fallback to system font.
Designing a font that will be public domain forever costs next to nothing. It's a one-time cost that pays dividends into the future and that will probably outlive us.
The government would create something standard and accessible, and anyone could use it. No encumbered licensing.
I think companies refreshing design systems is a waste of money, but the government doing it is actually incredibly prudent.
What you think is "next to nothing" will 99% turn into $300 million dollars and 10 years later about $4 billion will have been spent.
And 100% there are people waiting to milk the gov doing this. Maybe you are one of them? In that case...
Only because of corruption, which should be dealt with of course, but that's a totally separate issue that doesn't invalidate the act of making an open font.
The biggest issue is that you don't replace a serif font with a sans-serif one "because diversity".
There's a reason signs on the highway are using sans-serif and there's a reason letters and books are using serif fonts.
I did both write and typeset books and honestly it's facepalming that the previous administration did switch to Calibri "because of diversity and because it's now the default in Word".
Ah, OK. Microsoft is, partly, behind the move. This explains that.
A print, then typewriter, then computer typeface emulates a written script but also takes on a life of its own. Handwriting in english is mostly gibberish these days because hardly anyone uses a pen anymore! However, it is mostly "cursive" and cursive is not the same as serif and sans.
English prides itself on not having diacritics, or accents or whatever that thing where you merge a A and E is called, unless they are borrowed: in which case all bets are off; or there is an r in the month and the moon is in Venus.
So you want a font and it needs to look lovely. If your O and 0 are not differentiated then you have failed. 2:Z?, l:L:1? Good.
I use a german style slash across the number seven when I write the number, even though my number one is nothing like a german one, which looks more like a lambda. I also slash a lone capital Zed. I slash a zero: 0 and dot an O when writing code on paper. Basically, when I write with a pen you are in absolutely no doubt what character I have written, unless the DTs kick in 8)
I'll consider starting to slash my zeros. Seems legit.
Its called the letter “ash” and its borrowed from... (Old) English. Though its functionally reverted to being a ligature, which is what is was before it was a letter.
(Also, English has &, which was a letter even more recently—its current name being taken from the way it was recited as part of the alphabet [“and, per se, and”], including the effect of slurring with speed—and which also originated as a ligature.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligature_(writing)
Same root as "ligament" and "ligand."
Ligatures or contextual letter variants (such as s being written with a different symbol when it's at the end of a word) are a sin to encode as characters. They should be part of the presentation layer, not the content layer! And don't even get me started on OCR which thinks such things are good to "preserve".
Many computer science people I respect are huge typeface nerds, but personally I could never see much value in focusing on it.
There's an irony: the _Times_ (of London) commissioned it in 1932 to improve the readability of its newspaper, which previously used a Didone/Modern style typeface.
I like Times New Roman and I find Calibri, a rounded-corner sans serif, to be an absolute abomination of milquetoast typography.
It really comes down to the fact that it's better to be functional, forms don't need to /look/ good they need to work well. For aesthetic things we can still use the pretty fonts.
A couple of years ago I went into archives of Dutch newspapers to learn whether and how the famine of hunger in Ukraine (known as Holodomor) was reported back in 1930's. Fuck me, it was hard to read those excerpts. But it is what it is. OCR could've converted the font. The problem is, is the OCR accurate? Like, is my search with keywords having a good SnR, or am I missing out on evidence?
Personally, Times New Roman was likely the reason I did not like Mozilla Thunderbird. I have to look into that.
The thing about usability is that it's both objective and subjective, and one can argue that aesthetics is part of usability. For example, I find writing code much more pleasant with Comic Code font, and I can imagine that there are other people that would hate it.
Ever tried changing the font of a printed document? Or a PDF?
PDF -> Nope.
.doc(x) -> Sure.
Website, OS, apps (including terminal) -> Sure.
Now regarding PDF I might've tried a long time ago when reading some old document (like CIA about MKULTRA). I don't remember if I succeeded. But there are PDF editors out there. I do think it likely screws layout (esp. larger documents), but that can be true for .doc(x) as well.
And I can certainly confirm that changing the font of PDF will almost always result in a unreadable mess. Something about how a PDF doesn't have text "blocks" and instead fixes each character making text reflow almost impossible.
The Dutch dev of Calibri commented on the history [1].
He makes a couple of good points, nuances. The main one I liked is related to your premise: it was that the Times New Roman font was optimized for printing newspapers whereas his successor was meant for computer screens.
Ultimately, IMO this is just bullying people with bad eyesight and dyslexia (and said bullying I can only regard as hatred towards minorities which reminds me of a different era). My father had MS and due to that bad eyesight. He had special glasses with a special lens to read. Of course any font change has a learning curve, but to me this just hits home as I've seen him struggle to read.
Bifocals, I'm guessing.
A friend of my parents also made a custom card deck, with huge symbols and letters. That way, we could work around his disability. We always had to work around his disability, and it regressed but slow variant and he was also too old to get the medicine which effectively stopped the MS from getting worse. However, it meant other people who had the quick version or were younger got more QoL.
I don't think he ever used Calibri. I mean, at that time, he wasn't into computers anymore. He had all kind of health isssues due to MS. It pains me to think people like him now have more difficulty to read letters because of BS decisions like these just cause NIH or whatever the silly reason must be. But there's also good news: if it is digital, they can override the font and such.
The technical aspects you mention are important. I have diplopia, and also close one eye. It gets worse in the evenings. I love paper books and own many, but all my reading now is on a Kindle, with a huge font. It makes it so much easier.
* condensed glyph widths, for ease of setting in narrow columns
* high x-heights and short ascenders and descenders, so lines can be set tighter and more text thus fitted on the page
* robust forms and serifs to allow for the tendency of newsprint to absorb and spread ink
These features don't necessarily translate to improved readability in other contexts.
And changing it back to Times New Roman isn't wasteful?
The justification here is petty and wasteful on its face.
IMO the government should pick something available under an appropriate free license or commission a new font for the purpose.
(I personally much prefer Times New Roman to Calibri for printed documents, but that’s neither here nor there.)
Unfortunately, it’s also intended to be not just accessible, but ”principles-driven”. Can’t have that. (More seriously, it’s probably more appropriate for screens than print)
There is a metric-compatible open alternative to Calibri (Carlito) but it seems more vulnerable to lawyer shenanigans and doesn't have extensive tool support.
I have only bad memories of using it since I directly associate it with endless formatting fixes for my diploma and course works.