Times New American: A Tale of Two Fonts

When I jumped into my GNU/Linux journey in late 90s, TNR was nowhere to be found, and I believe is only available through "ms-ttcorefonts" or whatever the package is called (IOW, Times New Roman actually comes from Microsoft).

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".

Most font licenses allow one to embed it into a document and then use that document as intended (to print, view...), but do not extend the license to the document recipient to extract the font and use it in newly created documents.

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.

And Times is one of the three original Postscript core typefaces, along with Helvetica and Courier.

> Most font licenses allow one to embed it into a document and then use that document as intended (to print, view...), but do not extend the license to the document recipient to extract the font and use it in newly created documents.

Yes, but most users wouldn't have a clue that is even an issue or why and how to do the embedding.

As indicated in the article, serifs come from how original letters were carved into stones: they were an artifact of the tool in use.

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)