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Comment by gtk40 | Hacker News Reader

Over a decade ago (I think around ~2010) when I was in high school I had an English teacher who required Times New Roman for a paper. I got marked off because while I had installed Times New Roman, I had a word processor which had silently replaced another serif font as Times New Roman when I selected it. To be fair I think it was one of the Bitstream fonts that looked a bit larger than Times New Roman at the same size.

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> when I was in high school I had an English teacher who required Times New Roman for a paper. I got marked off

Isn't this... stupid?

Usually it's done so that the teacher can tell how long the paper is without counting words. Times New Roman at x pt with 1 inch margins fits a well known average number of words per page. The assignment will usually be "write x number of pages on..."

Using a larger font size or a font that renders larger at the same font size means you can write less content in the same space.

… but you don’t need to count the physical printed pages, you can just look at the .doc file? Let the robot do the word count for you, it doesn’t make sense to not take advantage of the same tools the author is using to create the document.

Turnitin.com and digital submission in general are relatively new, I was in high school 10-15 years ago and no teacher would have accepted a digital submission. Now I believe they would refuse anything but digital.

Our school is captured by google and schoology, so their dossier is already populated before adulthood.

Most teachers I know vastly prefer to grade on paper rather than digitally. Easier to just circle sections and write comments with a pen than deal with the review features in a document editor. I suppose they could print them out themselves? Or require submission in both digital and paper? But why bother when you can just have the students submit in paper.

Anecdotally, most teachers I know prefer digital. Papers never get lost, fewer trees, less to carry, and (of course) https://www.turnitin.com

Spoken like a true salesman!

I mean I actually agree, it’s way easier to markup a sheet of paper (unless you’ve got a computer setup you’re comfortable with for the task) - but in that case they can print their own copies, and use their own word processors to count the student’s words. It’s crazy to make up all these extra hoops for students to jump through just because teachers can’t figure their shit out technologically, like it’s a running joke how far out of their way instructors will go to avoid the easily accessible technological solution for some processes.

Fundamentally? No.

Sure, it might seem stupid over something trivial as schoolwork, but consider the same situation widely exists in the real world.

You won't say it's stupid when you need to send business documents and there's money on the line if there are incompatibility issues. Suddenly Windows, Office, and Adobe make a ton of practical, industrial sense.

I don't think so, maybe just outdated.

ca 2000 when I was in HS, it was clear that the font & format limits were to also help get students used to submitting printed standardized manuscripts later in academia.

But also to save the teachers from all of the same empty formatting flourishes which people do in the corporate world too. Colored text, unrestrained use of bold, fonts which are harder to read ...

12 pt, double spaced, Times New Roman was honestly a standard which started to be taught as early as elementary school.

In uni, strict formatting rules weren't uncommon either! At my school, within the humanities, formatting was strict to get students used to APA/Chicago and more persnickety guides.

Even in Analytical chemistry, charts made in Excel were banned outright because the prof wanted to push students onto tools capable of generating publication-ready graphics.

Usually it’s meant to prevent kids from changing fonts to make a shorter paper fit the page length requirements.

Ok, got it! Then it's actually clever and basically prevents what I was doing as a 7th grade back in the 80's, increasing my handwriting size to fit less words in the same space when writing essays...

It seems pretty stupid.

You could excuse not having adapted to, say, AI-assisted tools yet. The industry has to figure out best methods, then it has to trickle out so the younger instructors know about, and then it has to be propagated out to everybody, standardized, etc.

But word processors that could ignore fonts and provide word counts were pretty old tech by 2010! If you haven’t adapted your teaching to something that’s been widespread for decades… that seems like a willful ignorance.

Interesting, I wonder if something like that is happening to me. The TNR install seems to have worked, but some of the Sans fonts looks wonky, not sure if its Arial or something else. From what I gather, Inkscape takes the name of the font and then uses the font with the most similar name. But from what I can tell, many pdf files have partially embedded fonts with wonky names. If I had word available atm, I would check the pdfs against that --- I have to admit, word's pdf import function is pretty impressive at times --- just to see what fonts exactly come out looking funky.

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