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Times New Roman is being phased out at the State Department, replaced by Calibri

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Re: Times New Roman is being phased out at the State Department, replaced by Calibri

#131

Post by unethical_ban »

fprog wrote: post #91

A shame they didn’t opt for Public Sans, which was designed by the US Web Design System team. Though I see it only supports Latin characters at the moment, which might make it unsuitable for use at State. https://public-sans.digital.gov

I wonder "how many fonts we need". Is there a good, open resource for FOSS fonts, to compare them, and preferably a curation?

I agree with others on here, though. Everything our government does, and produces, from an IT/development perspective which is not a "competitive advantage" (security, etc.) should be open. Why there would be an official directive to choose a non-open font when so many open fonts exist, is beyond me.

Re: Times New Roman is being phased out at the State Department, replaced by Calibri

#133

Post by LarryMullins »

Joker_vD wrote: post #79
sdflhasjd wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And still not even A4

A/B/C paper series formats are based on metrics system and therefore, morally evil and unfit for the US consumption.

> metric [...] morally evil

I've never heard an American complain that Coca Cola is sold by the liter. There's no moral component to Americans not wanting to switch to metric. It's simply a matter of the switch and retooling being more hassle than continuing to use American customary units. Frankly, the difference seems to bother Europeans a lot more than it bothers Americans.

Re: Times New Roman is being phased out at the State Department, replaced by Calibri

#135

Post by causality0 »

pkaye wrote: post #128
maxk42 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside from licensing, usability studies show that serif fonts are more legible than sans serif fonts, so I have no idea where they came up with the idea that somehow they're harder to read for people with disabilities when all prior research I'm aware of has shown the opposite.

Apparently the serifs don't work as well on OCR and screen readers. https://twitter.com/John_Hudson/status/1615486871571935232

Why would you build a screen reader without targeting the most common font of the last thirty years? That's like making a license plate reader that has trouble with white license plates.

Re: Times New Roman is being phased out at the State Department, replaced by Calibri

#136

Post by anthk »

input_sh wrote: post #110
anthk wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are libre fonts with the same metrics as Calibri. Ditto with Arial and Times.

Are they (or any other libre font) on every Windows/Office by default?

No, but they are good for interoperability on standard documents so the layout doesn't get lost.

Re: Times New Roman is being phased out at the State Department, replaced by Calibri

#137

Post by Joker_vD »

garbagecoder wrote: post #124
smallerfish wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Replacing American exceptionalism with European exceptionalism (usually because of someone's trip when they were in college) is not necessarily always an improvement. ISO 216 isn't specifically European. It's used in most of the world. The same is true of the metric system. The world will indeed be incrementally better when people don't have to waste time converting measurements when operating between the US and el…

You assert it will be incrementally better without offsetting for the externalities of the switch, which would take decades. Also the metric system is European in origin. Despite what chapter 0 of every science book implies god did not invent it.

Here's the thing about the switching and the costs of it: every other country, much poorer than the modern US of A, went through it just fine. And in any case, this cost is not going to go down the longer you wait, on the contrary—unless, of course, the US industrial prowess utterly collapses so that there is not much left to upgrade.

Re: Times New Roman is being phased out at the State Department, replaced by Calibri

#138

Post by bruce343434 »

chrismorgan wrote: post #34
bruce343434 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My browser renders this in sans serif, but adds serifs to I. I'm on firefox/linux and it's defaulting to the css `sans-serif` and I don't have the energy to research how to find what that defaults to right now.

Dev tools → Inspector panel → Fonts subpanel → Fonts Used, and you can hover over each to see highlighted which glyphs are being rendered in that font.

Turns out it's Noto Sans Regular, and not DejaVu as another commenter thought!

Re: Times New Roman is being phased out at the State Department, replaced by Calibri

#139

Post by lucumo »

garbagecoder wrote: post #124
smallerfish wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Replacing American exceptionalism with European exceptionalism (usually because of someone's trip when they were in college) is not necessarily always an improvement. ISO 216 isn't specifically European. It's used in most of the world. The same is true of the metric system. The world will indeed be incrementally better when people don't have to waste time converting measurements when operating between the US and el…

You assert it will be incrementally better without offsetting for the externalities of the switch, which would take decades. Also the metric system is European in origin. Despite what chapter 0 of every science book implies god did not invent it.

> Also the metric system is European in origin.

As is quite a lot of American culture. Lots of good European ideas got improved on by America. Do one more ;-)

Re: Times New Roman is being phased out at the State Department, replaced by Calibri

#140

Post by generationP »

l- wrote: post #117
generationP wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the love for Times New Roman honestly. Any type of antiqua is better if you ask me.

In Times New Roman's name, Roman is a reference to the regular or roman style (sometimes also called Antiqua)

Let me be more precise: more classicist and less cramped forms of antiqua. Palatino, Garamond are the first two that come to my mind.
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