Most federal courts require documents filed there to be in Times New Roman font.
Moreover, due to executive order the typeface is now called “Times New American”.
Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri
301–310 of 738 posts
Re: Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.)
Neither of these decisions likely originated with the SoS themselves. I say the reasoning matters, though. You can try to avoid the discourse, but if you're American then you're in it. This administration is destroying the country for many reasons: profit, hatred of democracy, racism, control. And FWIW, it's the current administration foaming at the mouth about a font change, not the last one. In this case, the decis…
> Let's say, in an alternate universe where Rubio's department genuinely thought there were cost or coordination issues with Calibri. They could have reversed the decision and cited that.
So apparently Daring Fireball (of all places) got their hands on the full memo text[1]. And in all of the text, there are 2 sentences total that refer to DEI at all, the rest of it is talking about those coordination and cost issues. So I guess they did do that, they just also had to take their shots at DEI because why be in politics these days if you can't virtue signal even the most standard of decisions.
[1]: https://daringfireball.net/misc/2025/12/state-department-ret...
Re: Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri
#303US has genuinely lost it It genuinely feels like someone worked out that you don't actually need to build a better stealth bomber than the B2. You just need to infiltrate government enough to have them debate what fonts are woke Then I think "nah surely not. can't be that easy". And then next week...another insane thing comes out of US republican camp. I'm starting to think one does indeed not need B2s to defeat an e…
Go visit the popular hangouts for folks of the far right persuasion and you learn pretty quickly that this stuff is absolutely important to them, and they get spun up about it. What you don't see discussed is policy. It's almost 100% outrage about cultural issues and pretty much any reason to hate the left. Never substance.
To be fair, in response to this dynamic the left has gotten pretty good at focusing on hate for the other side, too. We all lose when nobody wants to talk policy any more.
Re: Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri
#304Calibri 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…
True though the confusion about that is largely when you're not dealing with words like passwords or hashes. In the context of words it's going to be generally disambiguated by context, I can't think of an example off hand in writing where I and l will that ambiguous. The removal of serifs probably has a higher impact to more people unless I'm missing some common situation where they'd be easy to confuse in context.
Re: Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri
#305I have a couple of thoughts about this. Firstly, I thought sans-serif typefaces were encouraged for digital media because they read better than serif fonts. But now that high pixel density displays have permeated the market, this might be a moot point. On another note, I wonder how much of the hate TNR gets stems from its ubiquity for having been installed on almost all personal computers for the past n decades. Paga…
My understanding has always been that serif fonts read better for long text, and sans-serif for short text - so signage in Arial and policy statements in Times New Roman. And Comic Sans for letters sent to friends finishing design school, obviously. There are all sorts of statistical rules falling out of studies about where the long/short divide is, ambient lighting, blah blah blah - but human vision is even more var…
> And Comic Sans for letters sent to friends finishing design school, obviously.
... and libressl. https://web.archive.org/web/20140625075722/http://www.libres... (and the talk - https://youtu.be/GnBbhXBDmwU?si=gMlhb2Xis5V8sR6K&t=2939 )
Re: Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
That's the "diversity" they were talking about?? Fucks sake.
It's not, although blind or highly vision impared people who use screen readers sometimes also have to rely on OCR when the document isn't properly formatted with text.
Using a sans serif font generally helps anyone with difficulty distinguishing letters so dyslexic, low vision, aging vision etc. individuals. It's not just for digital OCR.
Re: Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri
#307I've seen some comments about how Times New Roman was replaced with something else to improve readability by many. There's an irony: the _Times_ (of London) commissioned it in 1932 to improve the readability of its newspaper, which previously used a Didone/Modern style typeface. I like Times New Roman and I find Calibri, a rounded-corner sans serif, to be an absolute abomination of milquetoast typography.
It may look better but it's harder to read basically across the board for anyone with difficulty distinguishing letters. Sans serif fonts are easier for people with dyslexia without going all the way to a dyslexia specific font. They're also generally far better for people with all sorts of poor vision.
It really comes down to the fact that it's better to be functional, forms don't need to /look/ good they need to work well. For aesthetic things we can still use the pretty fonts.
Re: Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri
#308Calibri 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…
> Another issue is due to the font size and font metrics
The biggest issue is that you don't replace a serif font with a sans-serif one "because diversity".
There's a reason signs on the highway are using sans-serif and there's a reason letters and books are using serif fonts.
I did both write and typeset books and honestly it's facepalming that the previous administration did switch to Calibri "because of diversity and because it's now the default in Word".
Ah, OK. Microsoft is, partly, behind the move. This explains that.
Re: Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
One of the things that image shows is the slightly higher density of the Times version (compare row by row) allowing the paper to put more text on a page and thus reduce some of the costs.
This appears to be done by increasing the height of the lower case letters in the Times side while reducing the height of the capital letters at the same time. This then was also combined with a reduction in the size of some of the serifs which are measured against the height of the lowercase letter (compare the 'T' and the following 'h').
The Times is similarly readable at the smaller font size than the modern serif font - and scaling the modern font to the same density of text would have made the modern font less readable.
Part of that, it appears is the finer detail (as alluded to in the penultimate paragraph) - compare the '3' on each side.
Re: Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri
#310> calling his predecessor Antony Blinken's decision to adopt Calibri a "wasteful" diversity move And changing it back to Times New Roman isn't wasteful?
Blinken did change it to Calibri at the recommendation of the diversity and inclusion office. Whether or not it was justified is another matter, but there is no question it was a DEI initiative.