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Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri

reuters.com

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Re: Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri

#221
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Calibri font has "I" and "l" the same, according to Wikipedia. A better font should avoid characters being too similar (such as "I" and "l" and "1"). Only when used in a context where they can be confused. This is a situation where HN is going to give bad advice. Programmers care deeply about that stuff (i.e. "100l" is a long-valued integer literal in C and not the number 1001). Most people tend not to, and there i…

> Most people tend not to Yeah because normal people never have to deal with alphanumeric strings...

> Yeah because normal people never have to deal with alphanumeric strings...

Natural language tends to have a high degree of disambiguating redundancy and is used to communicate between humans, who are good at making use of that. Programming languages have somewhat less of disambiguating redundancy (or in extreme cases almost none), and, most critically, are used to communicate with compilers and interpreters that have zero capacity to make use of it even when it is present.

This makes "letter looks like a digit that would rarely be used in a place where both make sense" a lot more of a problem for a font used with a programming language than a font used for a natural language.

Re: Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: > The department under Blinken in early January 2023 had switched to Calibri

Times New Roman existed in 1950. Your comment does not in ANY way contest the parent comment.

So did sans serif fonts

Re: Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri

#224

Times New Roman is extremely common and often the only accepted font for official documents and colloquial works in post-soviet countries: https://www.cnews.ru/news/top/2018-12-10_rossijskim_chinovni... . I have only bad memories of using it since I directly associate it with endless formatting fixes for my diploma and course works.

And bad keming. Though, that’s technically not a fault of the font itself.

Re: Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri

#225
post #155

Calibri font has "I" and "l" the same, according to Wikipedia. A better font should avoid characters being too similar (such as "I" and "l" and "1"). Another issue is due to the font size and font metrics, how much space it will take up on the page, to be small enough to avoid wasting paper and ink but also not too small to read. So, there are multiple issues in choosing the fonts; however, Times New Roman and Calibr…

> Calibri font has "I" and "l" the same, according to Wikipedia. A better font should avoid characters being too similar (such as "I" and "l" and "1"). Only when used in a context where they can be confused. This is a situation where HN is going to give bad advice. Programmers care deeply about that stuff (i.e. "100l" is a long-valued integer literal in C and not the number 1001). Most people tend not to, and there i…

> Most people tend not to

Except the whole rationale for going to Calibri in the first place was that it was supposedly more accessible due to being easier to OCR.

Re: Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri

#226

Leaders and typefaces: In 1941 Adolf Hitler personally gave order to make the use of the Antiqua mandatory and forbade the use of Fraktur and Schwabacher typefaces. https://ligaturix.de/bormann.htm

Fascism relies on politicisation of aesthetic

[flagged]

Re: Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri

#227

I'm mostly surprised it wasn't Fraktur. How pitiful do you have to be as Secretary of State to get into minutiae about fonts, anyway?

As pitiful as the last guy, apparently? As the article says, the decision to switch to Calibri in the first place came directly from Blinken. (I try not to get into anti-anti-Trump discourse, but getting worked up about fonts seems counterproductive to me.)

Except that last guy was not pitiful about and did not had any ideological hateful proclamations.

It was choice for slightly better readability on screens. Plus that font was default in word. There were not emotional claims about it.

It is entirely valid to make fun of Rubio.

Re: Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri

#228

As the administration steps back from global affairs, it seems the State Department is searching for direction. Rubio would go like - we’re done with managing world affairs via the NSS, what should we do next? Let’s change the font for a new perspective!

Times New Roman is an old perspective. It’s all part of Trump’s plan to take America back to 1950 and pretend 2050 isn’t coming up.

They should bring back mid-Atlantic accents, then there'd be some silver lining to all this bullshit

Re: Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri

#229

As the administration steps back from global affairs, it seems the State Department is searching for direction. Rubio would go like - we’re done with managing world affairs via the NSS, what should we do next? Let’s change the font for a new perspective!

> it seems the State Department is searching for direction

I would argue that it seems more like the State Department is searching for distraction moreso than direction. From the murders, theft, and the epstien files.

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