When I read the headline i thought “well obviously they don’t mean Marco Rubio, there must be some famous publicist or something”. Cannot believe it actually was Marco Rubio, lol
What do you mean the TIRE company actually reviews restaurants?
Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri
401–410 of 738 posts
Re: Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nothing is more inefficient than the secretary of state thinking about and conducting meetings about the font used in documents. It just doesn't matter in the sense that it "doesn't move the needle". I expect the leaders of a government deciding on matters that have a real impact on people's live, not on stuff that from a practical point of view is totally irrelevant.
The global impression of the US is worth thinking about. The font is part of that.
It's really not. The used font just doesn't move the needle regarding the global impression. 99% of people never ever think or care about the font they use.
What else should be decided on on the highest level: spacing, padding, allowance of the Oxford comma?
It is useful that somebody thinks about that stuff, just not the highest level of the government.
That's like the CEO of Microsoft having meeting about coding conventions, space vs tabs, variable name format etc.
Re: Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
A font was the en_US version of fount. A fount was a particular example of a typeface. A typeface is something like TNR or Calibri. They all seem to have been munged into a single set of synonyms except for fount which has been dropped (so why do we still have colour and all that stuff)? A print, then typewriter, then computer typeface emulates a written script but also takes on a life of its own. Handwriting in engl…
The linked A+E thing is called a ligature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligature_(writing) Same root as "ligament" and "ligand."
It's a ligature in modern English, but it's a proper letter in Anglo-Saxon.
Ligatures or contextual letter variants (such as s being written with a different symbol when it's at the end of a word) are a sin to encode as characters. They should be part of the presentation layer, not the content layer! And don't even get me started on OCR which thinks such things are good to "preserve".
Re: Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri
#404Calibri was supposedly easier to read by people with disabilities. While this itself is debatable, that's not the reasoning behind the font switch. The mere attempt at making life easier for disadvantaged people is labeled DEI and as such cannot be tolerated by this administration.
> Calibri was supposedly easier to read by people with disabilities I'd love to know how that was determined. Given that: "If different fonts are best for different people, you might imagine that the solution to the fonts problem would be a preference setting to allow each user to select the font that’s best for them. This solution will not work, for two reasons. First, previous research on user-interface customizati…
> Second, and worse, users don’t know what’s best for them, so they can’t choose the best font, even if they were given the option to customize their fonts. In this study, participants read 14% faster in their fastest font (314 WPM, on average) compared to their most preferred font (275 WPM, on average)"
What you actually want to compare speed in the most preferred font to, to show that individual choice is or is not better than one-size-fits-all dictate, is speed in the font that would be chosen as the universal choice by whichever mechanism would be used (to show it is universally better, show that there is no universal font choice that would lead to the average user being faster than with their preferred font.)
All comparing each individual's preferred font to each individual's fastest is showing that an individualized test-based optimized font choice is better for reading speed than individual preference font choice, which I guess is interesting if you are committed to individualized choices, but not if the entire question is whether individual or centralized choices are superior.
Re: Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri
#405Good - Calibri is not open, badly supported on Linux et al. HN should rejoice in the US gov using a font that is open and truly cross platform.
Calibri works just fine on my machine. Just download the font using one of the many font packages available in your distro (i.e. https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ttf-ms-win11)
I don't think it's included by default but the font itself will just work once you install it.
As for open fonts (can fonts even be truly closed in the first place?), Times New Roman is just as closed and proprietary as Calibri is.
Re: Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri
#406A Glorious Font for the Times New Roman Caesar
Re: Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that much thought went into it. The change was initiated by the department's DEIA ("A" for Accessibility) office. Anything that office did was a priority for this administration. Keep in mind that the transgenic mouse breeding program used to make lab mice for research got defined because the President claimed Democrats were so woke they were funding "trans" mice research. Half of what they are doing is…
All true except the fact that it's not virtue that they're signaling.
Virtue signaling is for liberals. Conservatives prefer shitty human signaling. Eventually folks will take them for their word I hope.
Re: Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri
#408The first-world problems!
Re: Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri
#409As documented at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_Easter_eggs google search for "times new roman font" and the results are returned in that font. ( https://www.google.com/search?q=Times+New+Roman+Font for the lazy). Looks terrible on my screen.
I think it mostly depends on what we're used to and what our associations are.
Many computer science people I respect are huge typeface nerds, but personally I could never see much value in focusing on it.
Re: Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the reasons Calibri was selected over Times New Roman was it has a lower rate of OCR transcription errors, making documents using it easier for people using screen readers.
That doesn't make much sense, since a typewriter will neither type Calibri nor Times New Roman. And OCR should only be needed for type written documents, because any document made with Calibri or TNR is already digital.
We have a process at work where clients export information from their database as a pdf which they email to us so that we can ocr it and insert into our database.
No one else seems to think this is bat shit insane