Posted by italophil 2 days ago
"It’s like they spent $300 million on the movie, and then.. They just used Papyrus."
- Kanye West
I have only bad memories of using it since I directly associate it with endless formatting fixes for my diploma and course works.
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
What is involved in changing the font for a government agency?
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.
I’ll personally be taking my votes to supporters of Helvetica next election.
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
(https://practicaltypography.com/times-new-roman-alternatives...)
> When Times New Roman appears in a book, document, or advertisement, it connotes apathy. It says, “I submitted to the font of least resistance.” Times New Roman is not a font choice so much as the absence of a font choice, like the blackness of deep space is not a color. To look at Times New Roman is to gaze into the void.
> If you have a choice about using Times New Roman, please stop. Use something else.
And on Calibri:
(https://practicaltypography.com/calibri-alternatives.html)
> Like Cambria, Calibri works well on screen. But in print, its rounded corners make body text look soft. If you need a clean sans serif font, you have better options.
- - -
To telegraph an identity, TNR is a good choice for this administration; so, credit where due, well played. Still, I would have gone with Comic Sans.
But I have no idea what font was used in the book I just finished reading or the book that I'm returning to later today. My main question about a font is whether I can read it with old eyes.
I do agree that designers should care about these matters. I'll add that for some portion of the reading public TNR more likely means The New Republic than Times New Roman.
[Five minutes later: the book just finished, What We Can Know by Ian McEwan, appears to be set in Palatino, never a favorite of mine. The one I'm returning to, I'm not sure.]
To spite these people I force the use of Arial on the worst offenders. The list is now a couple of thousand websites long.
I picked Arial so that I could tell the web pages apart from those who had the good taste to leave my web browsers standard font alone. I don't mind arial.
It's important to keep the smugness balanced, thanks for doing your part.
In Firefox: Settings → Fonts → Advanced… → untick Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above. I’ve been running this way for almost six years now; it makes the web so much better.
But yes I agree content must come first. Typeface probably comes second!
I don't often genuinely laugh out loud at comments on HN, but that one was good! Subtle, classy, and a gentle yet effective dig.
It’s clear, legible and whimsical.
Funny, I would have gone with Tannenberg
If you are a Deep Space 9 fan, this is where you get to scream, “It’s a fake!!!”
HN should rejoice in the US gov using a font that is open and truly cross platform.
But there are open-source metrically-compatible alternatives to all of them, commonly included in Linux distributions and/or office suites like LibreOffice.
Probably the most popular set is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croscore_fonts, with Tinos, Arimo, Cousine, and in the extended set Carlito and Caladea. The former most popular set is probably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts, with Liberation {Serif, Sans, Mono}.
But a given system is definitely less likely to have a Calibri alternative than a Times New Roman alternative.
I keep both for naming compatibility and also because the 1.0 Liberation versions had truetype hinting (2.0 and up did not).
I don't think it's included by default but the font itself will just work once you install it.
As for open fonts (can fonts even be truly closed in the first place?), Times New Roman is just as closed and proprietary as Calibri is.
