Posted by italophil 12/10/2025
I would argue that it seems more like the State Department is searching for distraction moreso than direction. From the murders, theft, and the epstien files.
> The department under Blinken in early January 2023 had switched to Calibri
No, it’s all just fake gold and baseball caps.
Firstly, I thought sans-serif typefaces were encouraged for digital media because they read better than serif fonts. But now that high pixel density displays have permeated the market, this might be a moot point.
On another note, I wonder how much of the hate TNR gets stems from its ubiquity for having been installed on almost all personal computers for the past n decades.
Paganis are beautifully designed cars, but the labelling of buttons and toggles inside the center console look cheap (IMO) because their font seems straight out of a quickly made flyer designed by bored teacher who just discovered Word Art.
And Comic Sans for letters sent to friends finishing design school, obviously.
There are all sorts of statistical rules falling out of studies about where the long/short divide is, ambient lighting, blah blah blah - but human vision is even more variable than most biological quantities, so in the end general rules are the best one can really do.
Here of course, it's nothing more than rearranging the deck chairs, while the captain targets the next iceberg "to teach the ice a lesson!"
This is in-line with the advice here to use serif for long form and sans for short. When you're making signs and things like that, you don't have the repeated forms to inform your ability to interpret letters, so the serifs act to confuse readers, while in long form, they add flair, which could be more artistic and tasteful.
... and libressl. https://web.archive.org/web/20140625075722/http://www.libres... (and the talk - https://youtu.be/GnBbhXBDmwU?si=gMlhb2Xis5V8sR6K&t=2939 )
"It’s like they spent $300 million on the movie, and then.. They just used Papyrus."
- Kanye West
A simple correction would stop this spiral, but Reuters appears committed to forging a bold new era in which terminology is chosen at random, like drawing Scrabble tiles from a bag and declaring them journalism.
I didn't know this, and this explanation isn't really helping. (I did know there's a difference between typeface and font, but no idea what).
Why would this be basic knowledge when all most people ever have to deal with is the font options in Word?
The typeface dictated the shapes of those glyphs. So you could own a font of Caslon's English Roman typeface, for example. If you wanted to print text in different sizes, you would need multiple fonts. If you wanted to print in italic as well as roman (upright), you would need another font for that, too.
As there was a finite number of slugs available, what text you could print on a single sheet was also constrained to an extent by your font(s). Modern Welsh, for example, has no letter "k": yet mediaeval Welsh used it liberally. The change came when the Bible was first printed in Welsh: the only fonts available were made for English, and didn't have enough k's. So the publisher made the decision to use c for k, and an orthographical rule was born.
Digital typography, of course, has none of those constraints: digital text can be made larger or smaller, or heavier or lighter, or slanted or not, by directly manipulating the glyph shapes; and you're not going to run out of a particular letter.
So that raises the question: what is a font in digital terms?
There appear to be two schools of thought:
1. A font is a typeface at a particular size and in a particular weight etc. So Times New Roman is a typeface, but 12pt bold italic Times New Roman is a font. This attempts to draw parallels with the physical constraints of a moveable-type font.
2. A font is, as it always was, the instantiation of a typeface. In digital terms, this means a font file: a .ttf or .otf or whatever. This may seem like a meaningless distinction, but consider: you can get different qualities of font files for the same typeface. A professional, paid-for font will (or should, at least) offer better kerning and spacing rules, better glyph coverage, etc. And if you want your text italic or bold, or particularly small or particularly large (display text), your software can almost certainly just digitally transform the shapes in your free/cheap, all-purpose font, But you will get better results with a font that has been specifically designed to be small or italic or whatever: text used for small captions, for example, is more legible with a larger x-height and less variation in stroke width than that used for body text. Adobe offers 65 separate fonts for its Minion typeface, in different combinations of italic/roman, weight (regular/medium/semibold/bold), width (regular/condensed) and size (caption/body/subhead/display).
Personally, I prefer the second definition.
Come on, they're writing for a general audience, not a bunch of pedantic typographers and developers.
> a society that now casually refers to all pasta as "spaghetti"
I have never experienced this; in what contexts have you?
> taught to children
We were 100%, never taught this (in the UK).
> A simple correction would stop this spiral
It wouldn't, it would just mean fewer people understood what the story was about.
Serif fonts have some readability features of their own, specifically for printed word.
I think this came out back with Office 2007 or something. I believe Aptos is actually the new next generation font that should generally be considered an enhancement to Calibri.
While Microsoft isnt great at many things, their investment in font design and support is outstanding.
https://www.academia.edu/72263493/Effect_of_Typeface_Design_...: "For Latin, it was observed that individual letters with serif cause misclassification on (b,h), (u,n), (o,n), (o,u)."
https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10220037: [Figure 5 shows higher accuracy for the two sans-serif fonts, Arial and DejaVu compared to Times New Roman, across all OCR engines]
> Images - Use the original, which is digital.
> horribly inaccessible pdfs - Use the original, which has real text in the PDF
> horribly inaccessible websites - All text on any web site is digital. Nobody uses OCR on a website.
A massive paper producer like the government shouldn't adopt their type setting to people who are using technology wrongly.
Why didn't they fax it back and forth a few times as well, just for good measure?
images being digital have no bearing on OCR ability
Unless they are making documents on typewriters. And in those cases neither Biden or Trump font is an option.
No one else seems to think this is bat shit insane
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_New_Roman?st_source=ai_m...
This appears to be done by increasing the height of the lower case letters in the Times side while reducing the height of the capital letters at the same time. This then was also combined with a reduction in the size of some of the serifs which are measured against the height of the lowercase letter (compare the 'T' and the following 'h').
The Times is similarly readable at the smaller font size than the modern serif font - and scaling the modern font to the same density of text would have made the modern font less readable.
Part of that, it appears is the finer detail (as alluded to in the penultimate paragraph) - compare the '3' on each side.
I don't think that's the comparison you want to draw? The rows appear to hold very similar amounts of text.
But the rows on the left, in Times New Roman, are shorter than the rows on the right. So even though "one row" holds the same amount of text, one column-inch of Times New Roman holds more rows.
The Times New Roman looks more readable to me because it has thicker strokes. This isn't really an issue in a digital font; you can't accidentally apply a thin layer of black to a pixel and let the color underneath show through.
What is involved in changing the font for a government agency?
In 1941 Adolf Hitler personally gave order to make the use of the Antiqua mandatory and forbade the use of Fraktur and Schwabacher typefaces.
But stakes are quite low here. Some bureaucrats will have nearly undetectably harder time to read Trump speaches
Surprisingly to me the Fraktur typeface was the traditional "German" typeface but was disliked by Hitler.
I guess if Russia invaded Western Europe and Putin decided to switch from Cyrillic to Latin script so the subjugated peoples would more easily read and learn Russian, that would be neutral too?
Font face != different language + different alphabet.
Font, still a bad argument but technically correct. Font face, nah.
"In a hundred years, our language will be the European language. The nations of the east, the north and the west will, to communicate with us, learn our language. The prerequisite for this: The script called Gothic is replaced by the script we have called Latin so far"
(Besides, what's so strange about transposing Cyrillic to Latin? It happens all the time even today when people don't want to or can't switch keyboard layouts.)
And just like with the font, that shaped preferences for years.
There is your answer. He imposed his will - that's what dictators do. You have to be careful when the reason for any costly change is one individual's personal preferences. It's a bad omen.
> Equivalent to your boss ordering tabs be used instead of spaces.
That's not always equivalent, especially if it is to set a standard. Obviously, some people using spaces and the others using tabs is not ideal in situations you're referring to. It's also fine to change the standard, if they find a significant problem with the current convention. But if your boss wants it changed, and their only explanation is their dislike of the status-quo, then that's a red flag. The problem isn't very serious right now, but could grow into one in the future and you have to be on the watch.
As for the politics of that government, a history lesson; In 1930s Germany, Liberals did nothing to abort the rise of NSDAP, seeing them as economic allies if not political allies. They sold out their country and turned a blind eye to genuine evil for profit and the reduction of the political influence of their workforce.
Not. The problem is not even about which font is actually more accessible. It's the self proclaimed reasoning. Rubio, by his own words, states that the change is about aesthetics and anti DEIA politics.
However, if you want to argue about actual accessibility, which is not what is happening in the Dept. of State, the US government's own accessibility guidelines contradict the idea that Serif fonts are more accessible; https://www.section508.gov/develop/fonts-typography/
Do you happen to know anyone with a reading disability at all? A dear friend of mine has dyslexia, and I've seen first hand how important this stuff is for his comprehension.
Since it's all digital, this all shouldn't be a problem in 2025.
In an “Action Request” memo obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Rubio said that switching back to the use of Times New Roman would “restore decorum and professionalism to the department’s written work.” Calibri is “informal” when compared to serif typefaces like Times New Roman, the order said, and “clashes” with the department’s official letterhead.
As far back as I can recall, this is a politician who has railed against 'political correctness'.
Parallel universes
I got politely informed to not use NYTimes font in a paper I turned-in when I was in college. On that occasion, it was an accident. I'd taken the file to school to print, and my owiginal font selection had been replaced by the default. My professor merely said that it is hard to read by people with older eyes.
Several years later, I understand. My default font is now set for Liberation Sans. I have trouble reading 'decorative' fonts. For printouts, I use Liberation Mono.
https://daringfireball.net/misc/2025/12/state-department-ret...
