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Posted by italophil 12/10/2025

Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri(www.reuters.com)
https://archive.md/x0Sxc
404 points | 691 commentspage 15
Bender 7 days ago|
Perhaps it is time to get traction on "tabs vs spaces". /s

If they want to look like a proper government then the correct answer is monospace and in ALL CAPS just like FAA NOTAMS, obviously.

queuebert 6 days ago||
I'm glad to see that a government elected by rural, blue-collar workers is tackling the issues those workers care most about.

/s

ebbi 7 days ago||
[flagged]
youngNed 7 days ago||
But.... and this is important, it's not funny.

"Here is a thing that makes a slight difference, with no cost, to a small percentage of people"

"Nah, woke. Let's make it worse for them."

There is nothing funny about performative cruelty

fnordprefect 7 days ago|||
I'm with John Gruber, who is hardly a fan of this administration:

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/12/10/state-departmen...

"Calibri does convey a sense of casualness — and more so, modernity — that is not appropriate for the U.S. State Department. And I do not buy the argument that Calibri is somehow more accessible for those with low vision or reading disabilities. People with actual accessibility needs should be catered to, but they need more than a sans serif typeface, and their needs should not primarily motivate the choice for the default typeface."

Official departmental paperwork shouldn't look clownish.

ebbi 7 days ago|||
The same John Gruber that, quote tweeting a news article about Israel closing off phone and internet services to Gazans, wrote "Fuck around and find out"
roughly 7 days ago||||
> And I do not buy the argument that Calibri is somehow more accessible for those with low vision or reading disabilities

Oh well that settles it, John Gruber doesn’t buy the argument. Wrap it up and let’s head home, folks, this one’s settled, no need to refer to any actual research or evidence.

youngNed 7 days ago|||
> they need more than a sans serif typeface,

Agreed.

So... why are the administration going in the opposite direction?

> Official departmental paperwork shouldn't look clownish.

Oh. It's about looking clownish. Right. OK. Pull up a chair, this might take a while, and we will get to typefaces pretty late on, I'll be honest

xanderlewis 7 days ago||||
With no cost?
youngNed 7 days ago||
I hadn't planned on spending my evening googling the pay grade of government officials, calculating the time taken to change a font on Microsoft Word and extrapolating that over a year.

But I'm game if you are?

Jupyter notebooks or excel?

xanderlewis 6 days ago||
I'm not talking about monetary cost.
groundzeros2015 7 days ago|||
[flagged]
AshleyGrant 7 days ago|||
If you had read the article, you would know the answer to this question.

Calibri is a font designed to be easier to read on screens, which is where documents are primarily read in 2025. Switching to using Calibri as the default was a meaningful change that provided improved accessibility at literally no cost to anyone.

Switching back to Times New Roman, a serif font that is provably more difficult to read on screens is yet another act of performative cruelty by this administration who seemingly operates with "the cruelty is the point" as one of its core tenets.

groundzeros2015 7 days ago||
Is screen readability the only value to consider?

> If you had read the article

Please read the rules.

AshleyGrant 5 days ago||
> Please read the rules.

You made a low effort post, and I pointed out how if you had put in the effort to read the article prior to commenting you would have gotten the answer to your question.

Would you like me to be more patronizing to you and say, "The article clearly states which of the font changes was the performative one and which was meaningful."?

But sure, buddy, run off to hide behind a site rule the moment you get called out for a low effort post you made that is breaking at least two rules itself:

- Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

- Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

> Is screen readability the only value to consider?

Whether it is "the only value to consider" or not is beside the point, and you know it. The Trump Administration's only value they considered is "Biden did it, so we're going to undo it." They considered nothing else. You know. I know it. Everyone knows it. Why do we know it? Because they have made it abundantly clear that they have no idea what "DEI" actually is, so they just slap that label on anything the previous administration did, put out an order rolling it back, and use it as a wedge issue.

If he was actually worried about whether a san-serif typeface was worse for printed documents, he could have simply ordered that all printed documents must use TNR or any of the other better options that exist. But he isn't. He's simply concerned with killing "DEI," where "DEI" just means whatever they decide it means today.

youngNed 7 days ago||||
Performative? The one that you read about. The one that had a press release, the one that had articles on social media that you are commenting on.

Meaningful? The one that looked into which font was more readable, for the most people

groundzeros2015 7 days ago||
Do you have trouble reading Times New Roman? Every computer I used growing up used it in much lower resolution.
roughly 7 days ago||
No, but I’m also not an accessibility expert, so my opinion here’s pretty irrelevant.
bena 7 days ago||||
This is a performative change.

The change to Calibri was meaningful.

Because Calibri is an easier to read font on screens, which is where a lot more reading is being done.

Since it was done as an accessibility measure, it is seen as something for "inclusion" which is part of the scary "DEI" (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion). So it had to go, because forbid we do something that makes things slightly easier for people.

the_gastropod 7 days ago|||
Let's even say (incorrectly, probably) that the switch to Calibri was "performative" or "virtue signaling". That's, in my opinion, significantly less terrible than performative cruelty or anti-virtue signaling.
websiteapi 7 days ago|||
I'll never understand this silly take. they just took a venezuelan oil tanker. is that a joke to you? you might disagree with what they're doing, or argue they are incompetent, but joke is very strange take. they are very serious. ask some undocumented immigrants in the USA about how much they're joking.

in fact - any country seeing what trump is doing both domestically and internationally and not taking their actions potentially against them seriously is stupid imho.

bravoetch 7 days ago|||
I think by 'joke' people mean "their actions are unreasonable to the point of ridicule, and were they less consequential would be akin to the performance of a circus clown instead of a diligent policy maker."

But the rest of us just shorten that to "joke".

ebbi 7 days ago|||
Thank you - exactly what I meant. I thought it was a common understanding when used in this context.
websiteapi 7 days ago|||
So it’s a partisan word then and basically devoid of meaning and consistency across political lines. When hasn’t the us political class been a joke by such a definition…? Perhaps when we owned slaves, or interned the Japanese?
ebbi 7 days ago||||
I'm laughing at their sheer incompetence. This is coming from a minority who has been targeted by US governments policies and has lost friends because of this.

Yes, the US government is a laughing stock while we have sympathy for those negatively impacted by the decisions made by these incompetent idiots.

websiteapi 7 days ago||
you and I have very different definitions of joke it seems.
ebbi 7 days ago||
I think you just need to read more. Your comprehension of common terms in context is lacking.
cluckindan 7 days ago|||
Obviously they would take a Venezuelan oil tanker. Oil is the only reason Trump is interested in Venezuela.

https://intelpoint.co/insights/venezuela-saudi-arabia-and-ir...

lowbloodsugar 7 days ago||
Anyone who is laughing is a sucker and an idiot. You keep thinking this administration is incompetent, when in fact they are achieving all their goals. At this point anyone saying they are laughable should be assumed to be part of the propaganda. Ho ho ho, looks at the silly Nazis with their silly swastika.
ebbi 7 days ago||
what
istillcantcode 12/10/2025||
[flagged]
impure 12/10/2025||
[flagged]
TehCorwiz 12/10/2025||
[flagged]
deadbabe 7 days ago||
Similarly, under the Biden administration there was a push for memory safety and adopting the Rust programming language.

Now memory safety sounds too woke, and Trump administration will be moving back to pure C.

rsynnott 12/10/2025||
This is Michael Scott levels of managerial nonsense, bloody hell.

Is Trump incapable of hiring anyone borderline competent?

QuercusMax 12/10/2025||
The only thing these morons understand are surface level appearances. That's why we have so many TV people.

- Trump: The Apprentice

- Defense: Hegseth: Fox News

- Transportation: Sean Duffy: Real World / Road Rules

- Education: Linda McMahon: WWE (yes, wrestling)

... I don't feel like going any further, it's too depressing.

Edit: I just realized that Duffy is SecTrans because he was on Road Rules.

butvacuum 12/10/2025|||
Dear Lord... I'd not picked up on this- if true (I need to validate it for myself).
QuercusMax 12/10/2025||
I forgot Dr. Oz, who is in charge of Health and Human Services.

Lots of articles about this; here's a random one: https://deadline.com/gallery/fox-news-personalities-trump-wh...

jazzyjackson 7 days ago||
Secretary of HHS is RFk Jr, oz is in charge of Medicare and Medicaid
QuercusMax 6 days ago|||
Whoops, you're right. Too many clowns in this circus.
abhinavk 7 days ago|||
I'm sorry but the vaccine-skeptic RFKjr is US Health Secretary?
jazzyjackson 7 days ago||
Welcome to 2025
manoDev 7 days ago||||
The "Idiocracy" movie is now a documentary from the future.
jazzyjackson 7 days ago|||
I don't know that being a contestant in a couple of reality tv shows in college makes Sean Duffy a TV person

McMahon on the other hand was founder and president of WWE

jesterson 7 days ago||
[flagged]
wtfwhateven 7 days ago|||
https://ktla.com/news/gop-lawmaker-solicitation-arrest/
greenhearth 7 days ago||||
"TDS" is not a real thing, you clown. Grow up.
jesterson 7 days ago||
[flagged]
anigbrowl 7 days ago||
...says the person who hasn't mastered basic grammar.
jesterson 7 days ago||
You must be proud of mastering the grammar, aren't you? I guess there is nothing else to be proud of.
anigbrowl 7 days ago||
If you are going to make snide comments about the intelligence of others, be prepared for your own to be scrutinized.
jesterson 6 days ago||
If you reduce intelligence to knowledge of grammar, I can just pity you. Must be good to feel superiour.
anigbrowl 6 days ago||
Congratulations on missing the entire point.
The_President 7 days ago||||
Blinken was the name of the blind character sidekick in Men in Tights back in the day, so the preference of an actually less appropriate font for reading is on script.
cbm-vic-20 7 days ago|||
There's a difference between "Let's use Calibri to make our documents more readable" and "Let's go back to TNR becuase using Calibri is woke nonsense by Biden's guy". They could have used pretty much any other reason to switch back to TNR, but decided to make it a childish DEI/"woke" jab.
xigoi 7 days ago|||
Is there any evidence that sans-serif typefaces are more readable? I’ve previously seen headlines claiming the opposite.
IAmBroom 7 days ago||
You can find evidence for both sides, because life is more complicated than that. Do you have 20/20 vision? Hi-def screen? High contrast? Floaters in your eyes? Cataracts? Are you tired? How is the text laid out? Line spacing?

Literally all of these can impact the answer.

BobaFloutist 7 days ago||
Ok, now insert "broadly" or "generally" into the previous comment and respond to what they actually meant.
jazzyjackson 7 days ago||
Mixed evidence like they said, it depends
jesterson 7 days ago|||
You understand both justifications are actually made up? As there is no evidence Calibri has better readability, certainly it doesn't have anything to do with wokeism.
epolanski 7 days ago||
This feels like dystopia, sane management or administrations should delegate this stuff to experts, not politicians.

We live in the world were everything is now "vibed" really.

slater 12/10/2025|
Stopped clock, twice right?