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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

#181

Post by abduhl »

LarryMullins wrote: post #133
Joker_vD wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The metric vs imperial discussion reminds me of Android vs iPhone discussions: Android users tend to care a lot more that their text message bubbles are green than the iPhone users do.

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

#183

Post by midoridensha »

LarryMullins wrote: post #133
Joker_vD wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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.

There is, it's just that Americans are happy to overlook it here and there for completely arbitrary reasons.

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

#184

Post by realusername »

rhplus wrote: post #56
valgaze wrote: post #44

Allegedly during Colin Powell’ time at the State Department there was quite an ordeal to change paper sizes for communication between offices: https://www.govexec.com/magazine/2001/06/the-powell-leadersh... “correspondence between headquarters and overseas embassies, known as Diplomatic Notes, for years had to be accompanied by a legal-size (8 1/2-inch by 14-inch) cover sheet. That wasn't really a big deal when the n…

8.5”x11” is a standard size for the US and Canada, but not for the rest of the world. Which leads to the eternal problems for any NGOs or contractors working for the US government overseas who have to source Letter size for US gov partners and A4 for local partners!

I did not even know anything else than A4 existed, I just learned that now

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

#185

Post by WalterBright »

Boeing uses inches. Not feet, just inches. The drafting scales (rulers) we used were in inches, but divided into tenths and hundredths of an inch. The ball bearing catalog what in inches, but rather strange values, which turned out to be mm translated to inches.

I had a hard time recently trying to find a scale in inches and tenths and hundredths. It's just easier to user. I'm kinda sorry I sold my drafting equipment.

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

#186

Post by chrismorgan »

input_sh wrote: post #78
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.

Defaults on Firefox are all from DejaVu family: https://dejavu-fonts.github.io/ Mozilla has a custom font for their branding called Zilla Slab, but I believe that's only serif.

This is incorrect. Firefox does ship an emoji font, but for the rest it delegates default-selection to fontconfig, and it’s likely to have a very long list of possibilities, depending on its configuration (see /usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default for a start) and what’s installed.

Run `fc-match --all sans-serif` to see how it resolves. On my machine, Noto Sans gets higher priority than DejaVu Sans (though I’ve configured Concourse 4 as the top preference, in ~/.config/fontconfig).

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

#187

Post by wolverine876 »

LarryMullins wrote: post #133
Joker_vD wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The American military uses metric.

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

#188

Post by midoridensha »

elzbardico wrote: post #156
twobitshifter wrote: post #96

I find any document written in serif feels more professional and well considered. As a result, when I look at older documents, it seems that the past had higher standards for content and presentation. Seeing a Calibri memo from the state department would make me think that it’s illegitimate.

I am absolutely convinced that the past had higher standards for content and presentation. The choice of font faces probably is just a consequence.

It's weird because we have far better and more convenient tools for content and presentation now, but we're so lazy that we make poor use of them and so the output is worse.

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

#189

Post by mbreese »

dhosek wrote: post #175
gus_massa wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For sending official paperwork to a judge or a visa or something like that, there are a lot of rules. Sending A4 instead of Letter will make them reject your paperwork on the spot. Someone told me a horror story about a PhD thesis rejected because it has wrong margins (probably something about the margins of the document and additional margins added by the driver). He has to reprint all the copies. Most universities…

In the 80s at UIC, there was famously a woman in the graduate school who checked measurements of all margins and other spacing with a ruler and rejected dissertations which didn’t meet the strict requirements.

In the early 2000s there was a person at Indiana U who also did this. You had to get any dissertation approved by her before printing. And there was a ruler. Are PDFs accepted for dissertations yet?

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

#190

Post by katbyte »

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.

The imperial system is also European. fwiw Canada did the changeover to metric in the 70 and took about a decade and I’m rather glad we did it.
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