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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

#251

Post by morshu9001 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #221
IshKebab wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ha…

Legal language isn't very natural

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

#252

Post by denkmoon »

renewiltord wrote: post #226
denkmoon wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fascism relies on politicisation of aesthetic

[flagged]

While you'll get no argument from me about the Biden government being fascist adjacent, no. The font was chosen by that government for accessibility reasons. The font has now been changed for purely aesthetic reasons, attaching the politics of anti-DEIA to a particular aesthetic (serifed fonts).

As for the politics of that government, a history lesson; In 1930s Germany, Liberals did nothing to abort the rise of NSDAP, seeing them as economic allies if not political allies. They sold out their country and turned a blind eye to genuine evil for profit and the reduction of the political influence of their workforce.

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

#253

Post by layer8 »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #156
zzo38computer wrote: post #55

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…

> Maybe the government should make up their own They have, public sans, courtesy of USWDS, and it does distinguish between l and I with a little hook/spur on lowercase el https://public-sans.digital.gov/ https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Public+Sans?preview.text=1...

It’s also on GitHub: https://github.com/uswds/public-sans

The glyph repertoire is a bit limited, though.

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

#254

Post by opo »

papercrane wrote: post #185
blueflow wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Link on that, as OCR should be more reliable with Times New Roman due to significant serifs.

The memo at the time said the serifs can cause OCR issues. https://x.com/John_Hudson/status/1615486871571935232

Just because they claimed it, doesn't make it true. OCR and screen reader software in 2023 did not have problems with serifs.

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

#258

Post by WhyOhWhyQ »

ajross wrote: post #158
WhyOhWhyQ wrote: post #108

Is Calibri actually more accessible? Every step of this story seems pointless and fake.

On a screen, vs. Times New Roman? Absolutely, and it isn't at all close. Serifs on even the highest DPI displays look pretty terrible when compared with print, and lose readability tests every time they're measured.

Interesting. The Wikipedia page for Times New Roman has a pretty fun blurb printed in the newspaper when they first implemented it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_New_Roman?st_source=ai_m...

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

#259

Post by 1970-01-01 »

viraptor wrote: post #247
1970-01-01 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgive my ignorance but this seems to be one of the most neutral things Hitler did. He just didn't like the font so he ordered it to be changed. Equivalent to your boss ordering tabs be used instead of spaces. After the war was lost the arguments just continued. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiqua%E2%80%93Fraktur_disput...

It didn't happen in isolation though. There were a few changes that used aesthetics as a culture influence and what being properly German should mean. Another one which was more explicit was music https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_in_Nazi_Germany It was literally anti the idea of diversity and inclusion. Much like this change. And just like with the font, that shaped preferences for years.

That's still using their other culture choices to manufacture a problem with producing consistency in typeface. It's a stretch. Any good (don't take this out of context, please) leader will settle these kinds of trivial internal disputes and move onto important problems.
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