Times New American: A Tale of Two Fonts

What bothers me about the decision is their rationale. If they had just switched without any explanation, it would have seemed more judicious and politic, befitting a department of state. Even better would be to announce a thoughtful font choice with reasoning based on the font itself, without defaulting to some thoughtless option "because that's the way it was done in the past", and moving away from the existing choice "because DEI". As it is, in my opinion, they made themselves look like idiots by obsessing over fonts from the perspective of something like DEI, as if they are paranoid over any possible subatom of DEI infecting their presence. Rubio couldn't just make it about the font, so to speak, he had to get hung up on irrelevant details which makes him (in my opinion) look worse than anything he might be criticizing.

If you read the original announcement, my impression was that the choice of Calibri was because it it made state department functions easier as Calibri was the default in commonly used software (which seems kind of a poor reason to me, but one I can respect on practicality grounds). Legibility was also a concern (as it should be in my opinion). So something functional about Calibri (legibility) becomes "DEI" which is almost like cooties for this administration. Even if you disagree about the legibility of Calibri, denouncing legibility as a criterion per se seems absurd to me.

The whole decision seems like a joke to me and a lost opportunity to set a decent design standard.

I don't mean to accuse you of anything but to 99% of the population this is a complete nothingburger and it looks ridiculous that anybody would care (this cuts both ways btw I also think Rubio is being a cringy idiot). I just don't understand what the big deal is here and I really cannot understand why anybody (on either "side") cares.

You can see for yourself. They certainly would not have used Times New Roman.

But I suppose interoffice memoranda are meant to be skimmed, not read, so TNR or Calibri are both fine.

In general this is the way I feel about anything written in a Microsoft-, Apple-, or Ubuntu-supplied typeface. If you stick to system fonts you the pinnacle of embodiment of apathy in my book.

Have some backbone, browse through Google fonts, pick something that represents your organization and stick with it.

Even if you are a leasing office, pick a good font. That will make me more likely to lease from you because your attention to typography conveys to me that you will also be attentive to details in building maintainence. If you communicate in Times New Roman and Arial it tells me that you probably are apathetic about mold in the walls and electrical code as well.

I personally think that Computer Modern/Latin Modern from LaTeX looks a lot better than Times New Roman. I wish they'd standardize on that but it might not be included in Microsoft Office, so I guess Times New Roman it is.

That said, I feel the issues come to play with the differences between what is seen on a screen and what persists in physical print. I do wish they'd picked a better font in both cases... My own assumption about the Calibri switch was that it was the MS Office default, meaning one less step, but I guess that default itself has changed since.

My only preference would be for a typeface that has a free/open license for broad usage as a default. Also, given the nature of printed documents would probably lean towards at least some serifs to make reading easier, especially to better distinguish some of the more problematic characters.

"Look at this remarkably fugly downgrade. Here's why The Science says it's superior."

It's not libre, but font copyright is weird anyway, and the federal government doesn't always need to follow copyright.

In seriousness: Comic Sans seems to be a good font for dyslexic people and helps them read.

https://dyslexichelp.org/why-is-comic-sans-good-for-dyslexia...

https://www.hvdfonts.com/fonts/hvd-comic-serif

And nobody thinks of the London Times when he sees Times New Roman. It’s just a default font many used in Word.

Ornateness itself is associated with being attentive to detail and likely more wealthy.

And even if you take them at their word, it's a distinction without a difference. Serif is known to be more professional.

But! As many have pointed out, and he does about TNR in the article: the default font for documents tends to suggest apathy. That argument against TNR is just as strong for Calibri. And there are far better looking, more functional fonts than either of these two.

Of course there is no "a priori", the general public doesn't know what a letter is "a priori" until they are taught. At the same time they are taught which fonts are formal and authoritative and which are not.

Everyone knows Comic Sans is not appropriate for a legal brief. No matter if that is "a priori" or not.

But I am southern European so it’s a relatively common sight, I wonder if Americans view them differently.

Unfortunately both Georgia and Calibri are owned by Microsoft. You aren't going to find them easy to obtain for Linux for example; calling them "ubiquitous" is a mistake. Times New Roman is much older and easier to obtain.

Using a common font like Times-compatible (metrics-wise) does help to an extent, but it can still fall off quickly with different ligatures, Unicode-combining character support etc. To be honest, I've never seen a Word document that looks exactly the same when opened on two Windows computers, even if those two computers should be roughly the same (corporate managed computers): I remember it used to be affected by print settings back in the day, but not sure what triggers it today.

Admittedly, I only use Windows computers and Word documents the last few days at work, as I've been in the Linux world for the last ~27 years otherwise.

I'd also add that since it was literally The Times newspaper which created the font, and it was considered one of the papers of record for the time (no pun intended), the font was probably designed to have a sense of accuracy, truth and authority. In other words, the institution that created the font is very much part of the socially constructed aspect of this font. In this case giving it that air of authority via it's relationship with a newspaper of record.

My teacher training (quite a few decades ago) suggested that for people with dyslexia you should set large quantities of text;

# right ragged so inter-word spacing constant;

# without hyphenation;

# with line spacing larger than word spacing;

# and broken up into sections with headings that describe the content of the section.

(As it happens I rarely need to use large chunks of text in basic maths teaching)

[1] https://www.almendron.com/tribuna/wp-content/uploads/2021/04... Kennan's notorious cable from 1946 looks as if it would have severe consequences to me.

That said, as soon as you head down this path, more variance will occur and in the end you'll have something even more different than just accounting for what happens to the text on news paper print.

I might have suggested Roboto Serif or another OFL (or other open licensed) font face myself.

That said, for print, I think serif is a better option.

Calligraphy developed similar traits by virtue of using a tool that produced an oval shape, and that you had to take care not to leave marks when pen/feather leaves the paper.

With the printing press, when we became able to put many books out, we did start also doing some research about what makes a book easy to read. Not least of because we could now easily put many characters on a single line and print it in the thousands.

Serif or cursive fonts were the default "content" type, and sans-serif was reserved for titles, shop names and other "short texts" as a more "modern", cleaner look: serifs do indeed allow one to more easily track a single long line of text, as you can more clearly see the "baseline" and not accidentally skip into the line above or below.

The next challenge is switching to the next line once you are done with the one you are on: while serifs help there too, the more important thing is the line length. Thus the famous (is it? :) 60-70 word limit for a line, and why you also see many web pages that only take like 20% of our modern 32"+ screens when browsers are made full screen.

Now, columnar layout as popularized by newspapers does not really come from the same desire: like TMR, it actually comes from the desire to fit more on one page to save on costs. With a wider column of text, all the last lines of paragraphs would average out at being half-empty, which is quite a bit with a wide column.

Sure, low resolution screens made sans-serif inevitable even for documents, but compare that with the earliest segmented LCD screens: font was what you could get rendered with as little electronics as possible :)

But today, serif fonts on high resolution screens (though there are still 32" Full HD screens which are not really high-resolution), or with the use of subpixel rendering (antialiasing is no match, as you can see by connecting a modern Mac to a non-high res screen) are a great choice if you want to limit the space you use and maintain great readability.

However, sans-serif fonts can work as well, and you may only need to go with a larger line spacing or shorter lines. The trick is to aim for a number of words/letters, and not "pixels", though modern CSS treats them as a scalable unit.

(Sorry for all of this being a bit rambly, just wanted to share a bit of the history along with how we can best apply it today)

> Indeed, the stronger explanation for Times New Roman’s long reign isn’t aesthetic excellence, but practicality and inertia. Times New Roman was among the small set of typefaces bundled with early versions of Windows. It was also promoted as “web-safe,” meaning webmasters could reasonably assume it would render properly across platforms. In the early era of digitalization, choosing Times New Roman was often less a deliberate endorsement than a default imposed by limited options. Over time, the habit hardened into a standard, and institutions began to require it without much reflection, effectively borrowing their own authority to confer authority upon the typeface.

I believe "Times" is the venerable standard, and has been present on Unices and Macs since... forever. Now, TNR is the same metrics-wise IIRC, and thus it was always a recommendation to use a fallback line of the form "Times New Roman, Times, serif".