511–520 of 738 posts
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
The entire thing literally reads like an Onion piece. If I'd read this exact article in The Onion I would've considered it brilliant comedy.
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…
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…
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> 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…
The differences between individuals which perform better with different fonts may have nothing to do with the intrinsic qualities of the fonts but may be determined only by the previous experience of the tested subjects with the tested fonts or with other fonts that are very similar to the tested fonts.
Only if you measure reading speed differences between fonts with which the tested subjects are very familiar, e.g. by having read or written a variety of texts for one year or more, you can conclude that the speed differences may be caused by features of the font, and if the optimal fonts are different between users, then this is a real effect.
There are many fonts that have some characters which are not distinctive enough, so they have only subtle differences. When you read texts with such fonts you may confuse such characters frequently and deduce which is the correct character only from the context, causing you to linger over a word, but after reading many texts you may perceive automatically the inconspicuous differences between characters and read them correctly without confusions, at a higher speed.
Many older people, who have read great amounts of printed books, find the serif typefaces more legible, because these have been traditionally preferred in book texts. On the other hand, many younger people, whose reading experience has been provided mainly by computer/phone screens, where sans-serif fonts are preferred because of the low resolution of the screens, find sans-serif fonts more legible. This is clearly caused only by the familiarity with the tested fonts and does not provide information about the intrinsic qualities of the fonts.
Moreover, the resolution of most displays, even that of most 4k monitors, remains much lower than the resolution of printed paper and there are many classic typefaces that are poorly rendered on most computer monitors. To compare the legibility of the typefaces, one should use only very good monitors, so that some typefaces should not be handicapped. Otherwise, one should label the study as a study of the legibility as constrained by a certain display resolution. At low enough display resolutions, the fonts designed especially to avoid confusions between characters, like many of the fonts intended for programming, should outperform any others, while at high display resolutions the results may be very different.
Never before has a font change been so politically divisive. I’ll personally be taking my votes to supporters of Helvetica next election.
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For aesthetic or other preferences you change the default font to whatever you please. The default font shouldn't be about aesthetics, it should be first and foremost about usability. Especially on printed media since there it cannot be changed in a whim. A couple of years ago I went into archives of Dutch newspapers to learn whether and how the famine of hunger in Ukraine (known as Holodomor) was reported back in 19…
> For aesthetic or other preferences you change the default font to whatever you please. Ever tried changing the font of a printed document? Or a PDF?
PDF -> Nope.
.doc(x) -> Sure.
Website, OS, apps (including terminal) -> Sure.
Now regarding PDF I might've tried a long time ago when reading some old document (like CIA about MKULTRA). I don't remember if I succeeded. But there are PDF editors out there. I do think it likely screws layout (esp. larger documents), but that can be true for .doc(x) as well.
IMO Calibri and Times New Roman are both poor choices: they are not free. The US Government’s works are not generally subject to copyright, and IMO it’s rather obnoxious for their fonts to be restricted. Also, Calibri is specifically a Microsoft font, and maybe the government should be a bit less beholden to Microsoft. IMO the government should pick something available under an appropriate free license or commission…
Unfortunately, it’s also intended to be not just accessible, but ”principles-driven”. Can’t have that. (More seriously, it’s probably more appropriate for screens than print)
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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…
"Woke" is not, in fact, their words. The source article doesn't quote Rubio as saying "woke". The NY Times coverage ( https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/us/politics/rubio-state-d... ) goes into a lot more detail than Reuters, as is typical; they don't publish the full text of the order (IIUC this is common to protect sources), but they say Rubio cited a number of coordination and messaging issues, along with a metric…
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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.