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Comment by ken | Hacker News Reader

He lists only three 'flaws' with Times New Roman. The first is:

> It was created for a newspaper, so it’s a bit narrower than most text fonts

yet all the alternatives are almost exactly the same width. Plantin is even a bit narrower. How do they "avoid its shortcomings"?

The second flaw is "italic is mediocre", which I'm not in a position to judge.

The third (and main) complaint is "it connotes apathy", and one of the suggested alternatives is:

> EQUITY (designed by me).

I'm all for artists promoting their work, as long as they're honest about it. This page is basically an ad, right?

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If you're upset by Butterick linking to his own font then you're not "all for artists promoting their work". This is ridiculous. Is he supposed to pretend he doesn't make fonts in his book about typography?

It’s a good thing I’m not upset by it, then.

The site, and his complaints, came long before he had fonts to sell. And if you take the time and just read straight through it, you'll get a lot of knowledge and expert opinion (with which you may reasonably disagree), with no obligation or nagging to buy the fonts.

The site started years ago purely as an "educate yourself about fonts and stop using the fucking defaults!" site.

An ad coupled with some pretty shoddy arguments against a font that is extremely legible. I like typography as much as the next geek, but I have purposefully chosen Times New Roman many times in the past because it is so damn easy on the eyes.

Yeah, I just uploaded a PDF paper and did quite a lot of careful "typesetting" of the layout, font sizes and so on. I deliberately left the font as Times New Roman because I honestly think it's very readable, especially in print format.

"It connotes apathy" is a bit like accusing someone who eats enough vegetables of being "apathetic".

How are they the same width? It's pretty clear just from a quick look that every character in Equity is much wider than the corresponding one in Times New Roman.

He is honest about it. He wants the book's readers to buy his fonts. He says so. That doesn't mean the page is an ad; it means that the page has an ad on it, and he suggests several alternatives that he didn't design.

https://practicaltypography.com/how-to-pay-for-this-book.htm...

A lot of posts on HN are about "Hey I built this cool product" and I think that's perfectly fine.

The italic and bold of Times New Roman are adapted from standard newspaper fonts of the era and have no relation to the Roman which has its roots in Plantin. The whole development of TNR was a bit of a boondoggle and the face was received coolly by The Times when it was finally available for their use.

A big part of the ubiquity of TNR is the fact that Monotype created a large number of extensions to the type family for specialized uses such as mathematics and non-Latin typesetting.

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