Our studio, LucasFonts, designed Calibri. Here are our CEO Luc(as) de Groot’s thoughts on the matter:
The decision to abandon Calibri on the grounds of it being a so-called “wasteful diversity font” is both amusing and regrettable. Calibri was specifically designed to enhance readability on modern computer screens and was selected by Microsoft in 2007 to replace Times New Roman as the default font in the Office suite. There were sound reasons for moving away from Times: Calibri performs exceptionally well at small sizes and on standard office monitors, whereas serif fonts like Times New Roman tend to appear more distorted. While serif fonts are well-suited to high-resolution displays, such as those found on modern smartphones, on typical office screens the serifs introduce unnecessary visual noise and can be particularly problematic for users with impaired vision, such as older adults.
Professional typography can be achieved with both serif and sans-serif fonts. However, Times New Roman—a typeface older than the current president—presents unique challenges. Originally crafted in Great Britain for newspaper printing, Times was optimised for paper, with each letterform meticulously cut and tested for specific sizes. In the digital era, larger size drawings were repurposed as models, resulting in a typeface that appears too thin and sharp when printed at high quality.
Serif fonts are often perceived as more traditional, but they are also more demanding to use effectively. While a skilled typographer can, in theory, produce excellent results with Times, using it in its default digital form is not considered professional practice.
Calibri, by contrast, incorporates extensive spacing adjustments and language-specific refinements. The digital version of Times New Roman, developed in the early days of computing, offers only minimal kerning and letter-pair adjustments. This is especially evident in words set in all capitals—such as “CHICAGO”—where the spacing is inconsistent: the letters “HIC” are tightly packed, while “CAG” are spaced too far apart. Microsoft cannot rectify these issues without altering the appearance of existing documents.
As an aside, I didn't know what Comic Sans looks like, so I searched on Google and it rendered the whole page in that font. I tried with other Fonts too like Arial and Times New Roman, and it did the same there. So cool!
Very cool... but I can't seem to get it to do so for other fonts I can think of off the top of my head... Inconsolata, Consolas, Fira Code, etc. "Times New Roman" does work as well.
Would be cool to see google support this for at least all the fonts in Google Fonts' library, since they're already well supported web fonts.
Your comment may be in jest but there is some evidence that "easier to read" does not benefit "retain what was read."
And that brings us back to these ugly fonts. Because their shapes are
unfamiliar, because they are less legible, they make the mind work a little
harder; the slight frisson of Comic Sans wakes us up or at least prevents us
from leaning on the usual efficiencies. “The complex fonts . . . function
like an alarm,” Alter writes. They signal “that we need to recruit additional
mental resources to overcome that sense of difficulty.”
i tend to find the kerning issues noted by the calibri team are moot. most Times New Roman is perfectly legible with careful observation and maybe a fresh cup of covfefe.
I would say it’s worse than that. Read Plato’s “Republic” and you may come to appreciate a much more expansive appropriateness of Comic Sans, beyond just the current administration.
Maybe when (if?) the Democrats take back the House and Senate in 2026. Right now Congress is solidly right-wing and sees no reason to impeach...nor would a conviction ever happen, even if the trial was held.
I bet they want to get rid of Calibri because it was designed by a Dutch person. There's only two things I hate in this world, people who are intolerant of other people's cultures... and the Dutch.
This reply is far too polite, but I understand protocol and necessity dictates those words.
If you cannot say it then let me: that spiteful, revengeful petty-minded fuckwit needs to be told that it's a fucked decision of the first order, and that someone in his position has no right nor the time to be involved in grinding the minutiae of state so fine.
Damn, the diversity of people one can meet here on HN continues to amaze me. Even after almost 13 years.
> The decision to abandon Calibri on the grounds of it being a so-called “wasteful diversity font” is both amusing and regrettable.
The cruelty (in this case, against people with visual impairments) is the actual point, as always, and the appearance of "going back to the good old times" is the visual that's being sold to the gullibles.
May I ask what your thoughts are on fonts that prioritise legibility over everything else, like Atkinson Hyperlegible? IMHO Calibri has a better balance between legibility and a consistent/polished look. The Munich transportation company MVG wanted to set an example here and adapted this font for their information screens at subway stations, on trains etc. There's one catch though: because Atkinson Hyperlegible tends to have wider glyphs than the previous (also sans serif, of course) font they used, they had to reduce the font size to fit the same amount of information on the screens, so the increased readability is partly counteracted by the decreased font size.
As a lay person who likes to look at fonts closely, the purpose they are intended for matters. I don't like the Atkinson font for body text because I find it too round. For a transit sign I suppose it is fine since it would be printed at display sizes and only momentarily gazed at.
Calibri is a high-quality font that works as body text, but it's cold.
Times NR on paper is fine, on screen it is not fine unless you have a high resolution display.
Politics aside, I never liked Calibri, until last year. I think it has a place for small text printed on paper, but other than that, there are far better fonts out there. The non-sharp/round edges/corners and the fact that it looks a bit childish make me not want to use it in anything serious/professional. It's also waaay over-used by people who don't have a taste in design and just select the default font in their PowerPoint/Word files.
Calibri is a pretty nice screen font. That said, I would rather see official documents in a non-commercially licensed font face that can be used by any/all OSes and platforms without incumbrances.
The current administration is regressive and explicitly, triumphantly anti-expert.
Within this environment the decision to eschew the font that was expertly designed for present needs in favor of one designed in the past for different ones makes perfect sense.
I love how emphasize is given to accessibility for older adults, such as the orange man. But I guess he gets his printouts with few words and big fonts anyways.
The way he writes indicates that he has very little experience with reading in the first place. Weird wording, strange capitalization and punctiation, etc.
Funny how they make this joke about Trump when biden got caught on camera using cue cards and having reporters questions and headshots on a cheat sheet...
Can he read? No doubt he can read some. I can't say he's illiterate. But functionally, he's nowhere near the reading and comprehension skills of what we should expect from a national leader.
Your Calibri font is Microsoft proprietary and is not open source. It exists so that MS Office documents won't look right on non-Microsoft systems. It's a dirty aspect of Microsoft's Embrace-Extend-Extinguish stategy meant to further its monopoly. It's disgusting that you cite all of these wonder benefits of Calibri without admitting the true underlying reason it exists.
>Serif fonts are often perceived as more traditional, but they are also more demanding to use effectively. While a skilled typographer can, in theory, produce excellent results with Times, using it in its default digital form is not considered professional practice.
This reads like your CEO is mixing an argument against serifs with an argument against Times specifically. Later on they make a case against Times' lack of support for more modern features in digital fonts, which is a fine argument, but a question comes to mind: is the solution a sans-serif font?
It seems to me upon reading the article that Rubio's staff, or Rubio himself, is being overly specific with the font and I suspect that, being uninformed, what they really want is a serif font rather than Times New Roman, specifically. Maybe I'm wrong.
In any case, I'd like for you/your CEO to make it clearer, if you will: do you believe official government communications should use a sans-serif font altogether or is it just a problem with Times? Or both?
On a more personal note, is there any serif font you'd suggest as an alternative?
> ...according to an internal department cable seen by Reuters...
The jab at the DEIA is petty, sure. But if the only intent was to smear them, why didn't they even announce it publicly? It was the choice of Reuters and HN to make an MS Office font change(!) a big deal.
> U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday ordered diplomats to return to using Times New Roman font in official communications, calling his predecessor Antony Blinken's decision to adopt Calibri a "wasteful" diversity move, according to an internal department cable seen by Reuters.
I read the title of this and as I could not wrap my head around the idea of "Rubio" here actually meaning Marco Rubio, I assumed this was a font name, but also laughing to myself just how hilariously absurd it would be for the Secretary of State to involved in picking fonts...only to click the link and discover that yes, it is exactly that absurd.
Did you have that kind of reaction, that it’s absurd, when Blinken ordered the use of Calibri after ~20 years of consistent use of Times New Roman?
It is objectively more concerning and “absurd”, regardless of “team”, that Blinken arbitrarily introduced fragmentation by adding an additional font to official government communications when a convention had been established across government to use Times New Roman.
Can you cite a source that Blinken's decision was arbitrary? Because Rubio himself is quoted here as attributing a reason for the change (i.e. that it wasn't arbitrary).
I'm also interested to hear your thoughts on the arbitrariness of Microsoft's decision to switch to Calibri in 2007 - imagine the "fragmentation" that must have caused across the business world!
Blinken made no public statements on this until he was asked about it. He did not come out and say for example, "For too long, the vision impaired community have been discriminated against by the systemic bias via the use of Times New Roman. Today we are taking action to change this and restore the dignity of those this font has long oppressed", but Rubio just did exactly this. For all I can tell the actual decision was a recommendation made by an internal team doing an accessibility review.
The only other place I’m familiar with people making grandiose announcements about their font selection, other than a font company announcement, is here on HN.
Sure, this is a good point, but only if you completely ignore the the accessibility gains provided by the change. But I'm guessing rationality wasn't on the menu when this was written.
If changing fonts once was a wasteful empty gesture that they used to pat themselves on the back and which didn't benefit anyone, then isn't changing it a second time the exact same thing?
People do have tools to make things more readable. Some of those tools are professionally designed fonts and typefaces which are easier for people with low vision to read.
You sound like someone saying we shouldn’t have ramps and elevators because crutches exist.
> if a person is visually impaired, why wouldn't they have tools at their disposal to make things readable?
If it's on a screen in a browser, probably. If it's printed, or on a display not under a reader's control, probably not.
FWIW, I'm partially split. I generally prefer sans-serif overall - have for decades. I think I slightly prefer serif for some printed material visually, but... when I actually have to engage and read it, for long periods, I think I tend to opt for sans-serif. Noticed this on my kindle years ago, and kindle reader now - I usually swap to sans-serif options (I think it's been my default for a while).
If I were to guess, the switch to Calibri in the first place was because people were able to use the MS default in practice instead of having to hand change it, or use "official" templates, which imo is probably more appropriate anyway.
I think Calibri is arguably a better font, to me the bigger issue is the commercial license used in govt works.
> They haven't. And you really think changing to Calibri benefitted anyone?
The wild thing is that even if you don’t respect the switch to Calibri on the grounds that it doesn’t really benefit anyone and is therefore wasted effort for little or no gain, the decision to switch back is a decision to double that wasted effort.
That said, it’s clear from the daring fireball story linked in the thread that this is being super overblown and Rubio isn’t really making an argument that Calibri is wasting money. This is an arbitrary decision.
that was the cost of additional a11y remediation, likely the direct cost of using a different font/typeface going forward was the time it took for people to read the memo and get used to change the formatting (maybe even set a new default, maybe change templates).
of course simply comparing years without a control we have no way of knowing the effect of the change (well, if we were to look at the previous years at least we could see if this 145K difference was somehow significant or not)
The levels of pettiness in this administration know no bounds. I'm sure they'll forbid the use of "woke", and require all government employees to say "I terminated sleep this morning".
This is demonstrably false. Previous administrations have not. It used to be normal to do things like keeping cabinet members appointed by their opponents or not put up a mocking picture of your predecessor in the white house.
> It used to be normal to do things like keeping cabinet members appointed by their opponents
This particular thing was not all that common between Presidents who succeed normally by election. I think the most recent was Robert Gates serving as SecDef across the Bush II/Obama transition, before that there were five kept across the Reagan/Bush I transition, and no more in the post-WWII period.
(It’s true that the pettiness level in this Administration is unprecedented, but this is not a valid example.)
True, I didn’t mean it was routine but it was somewhat normal. I just wanted to show the incredible range of professional behaviour that has disappeared.
Petty as in 'small and does not really matter' or petty as in 'vindictive'. All administrations do many small things that may not ultimately have much impact, but often those may be for benign reasons. Understanding the reasoning behind the decisions would help in determining what kind of 'petty' this is.
So what next? Wheelchair ramps? Seats for the elderly and the pregnant? Accessibility features don't displace or even inconvenience the majority in any manner. They only make facilities accessible to an additional crowd, who should be getting them as a matter of right in the first place. What's the end game here?
The endgame is to normalize punishing groups/individuals for any reason on a whim of the ones in charge. Start with minorities and people who can’t defend themselves, then later you can do easier to anyone who gets inconvenient. Despotism 101.
They can be if a font is chosen due to it being easier to read for some people and then it's reverted so that those people will then struggle to read. It's akin to removing ramps from shops to make it awkward for those in wheelchairs.
The president of the US struggles to stay awake in his brief detours from the golf course. It’s a perfect metaphor for the country. All seriousness has left the building.
If I say I bought a yellow car, nobody cares. If I say I bought a yellow car to troll the libtards, now everybody is mad even though what I said makes no sense and it all has little consequence anyway.
Or maybe the government should have a common convention regarding official government communications, which Blinken added fragmentation to by arbitrarily changing the font away from Times New Roman.
> A cable dated December 9 sent to all U.S. diplomatic posts said that typography shapes the professionalism of an official document and Calibri is informal compared to serif typefaces.
> "To restore decorum and professionalism to the Department’s written work products and abolish yet another wasteful DEIA program, the Department is returning to Times New Roman as its standard typeface," the cable said.
I don't read that purely as an "anti-woke" move, why did Reuters only highlight that part and not the bit about professionalism? I do indeed agree that serifs look more authoritative.
The definition of “arbitrary” includes “upon personal whim”, i.e., the State Dept leadership, not coordinated across or with other depts, and “not in a systematic manner”.
I get that people’s biases make accepting reality difficult, but this will all end poorly if you can’t even just be objective on basic things like it being detrimental for one single department of the federal government to arbitrarily change rather significant things like the official font, even worn text, communication is the primary work product and format.
Why did you ignore all the other aspects and simply latch onto something you thought was a loophole because you cannot objectively adapt a relevant definition?
This is not reddit. You should have higher standards for yourself.
Yes, a true "mask-off moment": I do find that classic LaTeX papers look more trustworthy than whatever MS Word outputs by default.
Associating TNR with authoritarianism would not even be historically accurate, because many authoritarians pushed to simplify writing (Third Reich, Soviets, CCP); if anything, TNR looks _conservative_, which is probably the look that Rubio is going for.
Because, even if there is a good argument to replace Calibri on grounds of professionalism, the cable still explicitly mentions the "anti-woke" aspect. At best, it's another sideswipe aimed at minorities and people who represent them. At worst, it's 'doing something wrong purely because of prejudice'.
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
> A more dignified Secretary of State would have resigned when this news surfaced.
I remain impressed at the number of longstanding Republican politicians that have been willing to sacrifice their dignity and likely their political career on the Trump altar. It is a one-way trip for their credibility, and when Trump is gone what are they going to do?
The only interesting right wing politician to me right now is MTG. And that's an odd position to find myself in. She is a clown, but suddenly she seems much more real for a moment. Like we might have caught a glimpse of the actual person. I am faintly curious how her political career shapes up over the next few years (assuming her resignation does happen and is not the actual end of her ambitions).
Well, you can come up with this position or view on a 5 minute toilet break after reading something that rallied you up. Once you have a voice you can trigger an avalanche with very little it seems.
Calibri 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 customization has found that most users don’t use preference settings, but simply make do with the default.
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)"
> 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.
The (ex-)scientist in me is looking for a controlled study, ideally published in a peer reviewed journal, looking at - how can I put this - actual data.
"A single-subject alternating treatment design was used to investigate the extent to which a specialized dyslexia font, OpenDyslexic, impacted reading rate or accuracy compared to two commonly used fonts when used with elementary students identified as having dyslexia. OpenDyslexic was compared to Arial and Times New Roman in three reading tasks: (a) letter naming, (b) word reading, and (c) nonsense word reading. Data were analyzed through visual analysis and improvement rate difference, a nonparametric measure of nonoverlap for comparing treatments. Results from this alternating treatment experiment show no improvement in reading rate or accuracy for individual students with dyslexia, as well as the group as a whole. While some students commented that the font was “new” or “different”, none of the participants reported preferring to read material presented in that font. These results indicate there may be no benefit for translating print materials to this font."
Advocacy for people with disabilities is important, but actual data may be even more important.
A meaningful testing of the differences between fonts is greatly complicated by the effect of the familiarity with the tested fonts.
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.
> 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.
I'm afraid I assumed this particular part was a joke, but having read it several times I'm no longer sure ...
Assuming it's not a joke, what would you suggest to readers of content using any particular font who don't have "very good monitors"? What are they supposed to do instead? Not attempt to read the content? Save up for a better monitor?
I have written the above posting before reading the complete research paper linked by the previous poster.
After reading the complete paper, I have seen that the study is much worse than I had supposed based on its abstract.
This study is typical for the font legibility studies made by people without knowledge about typography. I find annoying that such studies are very frequent. Whoever wants to make such a study should consult some specialist before doing another useless study.
The authors claim that a positive feature of their study is the great diversity of fonts that they have tested: 16 fonts.
This claim is very false. All their fonts are just very minor variations derived from 4 or 5 basic types and even those basic types have only few relevant differences from Times New Roman and Arial.
All their fonts do not include any valuable innovation in typeface design made after WWII, and most fonts do not include any valuable innovation made after WWI. They include a geometric sans serif, which is a kind of typeface created after WWI, but this kind of typefaces is intended for packaging and advertising, not for bulk text, so its inclusion has little importance for a legibility test.
I would classify all their 16 typefaces as "typefaces that suck badly" from the PoV of legibility and I would never use any of them in my documents.
Obviously, other people may not agree with my opinion, but they should be first exposed to more varied kinds of typefaces, before forming an opinion about what they prefer, and not only to the low-diversity typefaces bundled with Windows.
After WWII, even if the (bad in my opinion) sans-serif typefaces similar to Helvetica/Arial have remained the most widespread, which have too simplified letter shapes, so that many letters are ambiguous, there have appeared also other kinds of sans-serif typefaces, which combine some of the features of older sans-serif typefaces with some of the features of serif typefaces.
In my opinion, such hybrid typefaces (e.g. Palatino Sans, Optima Nova, FF Meta, TheSans, Trajan Sans) are better than both the classic serif typefaces and the classic sans-serif typefaces.
The purpose of that research study wasn't to survey the entire history of sans-serif design(!), it was to answer a fairly focused question: does OpenDyslexic improve reading for the population it claims(or claimed) to help?
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 virtue signalling and posturing without any real understanding of what they are doing.
The funny thing is that they were indeed funding “trans” mice research:
> To understand the effects of feminizing sex hormone therapy on vaccination, we propose to develop a mouse model of gender-affirming hormone therapy, assess its relevance to human medicine through singe-cell transcriptome studies, and test the immune responses of “cis” vs. “trans” mice to a HIV vaccine.
I prefer cruelty signaling, because there is profound difference between the impact of the two on the world. Insisting on naming things so that "bad thing" and "good thing" are undistinguishable is not neutral, it is biased and favors bad actors.
It is material exactly here. The preference for "ideology signaling" comes from desire to frame both sides as the same. "Cruelty signaling" is very accurate descriptor. It does not even suggest right wing only thing, if someone on the left signals cruelty, they would engage in cruelty signaling. And if someone on the right performatively helps poor, they are engaging in virtue signaling.
The trouble is, if the things are called as what they are, you cant say "both sides are the same". Because one side is promoting cruelty and the other is not.
> says things they don't believe to curry favour
If you do not believe that trans people should be beating up, but say so to look manly to your boss, you still promoted beating of trans.
I notice that people are largely staying pretty quiet about the politics of the Kirk murder since shortly after it happened. I assume it is because, to the extent there is evidence of any ideology, groyper fits as well as leftist. Maybe better, even.
I cannot decide to what extent they see it that way. They certainly have entirely plausible virtuous reasoning for everything they do. Whether that is what they actually believe or not, I have no idea. It is hard to understand the point of view of someone who seems like causing pain is their only priority, and I prefer to think that only describes a small fraction of the people I disagree with politically.
You would need to ask that of someone who agrees with their font choices. I am only opining that they probably have $REASONS that they believe to be virtuous, and that by calling it virtue signaling, we point that out.
In my time as a righteous woke progressive, it eventually dawned on me that the other side was just as likely to believe in the righteousness of their cause, even if I couldn't understand their reasoning for it. It also dawned on me that the righteous folks on the other side of the divide likely see my beliefs and the reasoning by which I arrived at them as equally baffling.
If both sides believe fully in their righteousness, and see their opponents as wholly unreasonable, then we will end up in a non-religious holy war.
The only way to recover is for both sides to turn down their righteousness.
One small step to do that is to at least try to understand--without agreeing--why the people with whom you disagree hold their beliefs, which ones are inflexible and which are mutable.
I just don't understand why it would be a virtue to deliberately make things harder for people. If the font was neutral in terms of being easy to read, then they would never have touched it. To my mind, they're making a "virtue" out of cruelty.
The problem is that we've seen what this kind of "righteousness" leads to (gas chambers, The Final Solution, World War II) and yet we're heading down the same road. There is no reasoning with Nazis.
>I just don't understand why it would be a virtue to deliberately make things harder for [some] people
Yes, obviously, you have stated this before. You are clear on that. I agree with you.
What you don't seem to have done (because you keep saying you don't understand why it would be a virtue) is steelmanned the argument of the other side. Only by doing that can you 1) understand why their plan would be considered virtuous by them, 2) understand what the costs of the calibri font are, and 3) make an informed and rational decision.
Maybe you're right and there is nothing that supports their decision except the parts you see as cruelty, but my suspicion is that you havent investigated that.
Yes, you're right about me not investigating and steel-manning the arguments from the other side.
However, I think it's a mistake to do so as you cannot deal with fascism by discussion, reasoned argument and logic. When a country starts rounding people up and putting them in concentration camps (it's not a prison if people are kept there without due process) then clearly the fascists have taken over. Instead of playing their game of disingenuous arguments (which are mainly used for distraction and to influence the gullible), their behaviour needs to be called out for what it is.
It's like with Musk's Nazi salutes - any attempt to rationalise that as anything else (e.g. "he's autistic", "sending his heart") is a lie and in my opinion, they deliberately do things which are unjustifiable just to see who will show loyalty and follow the party line no matter how ridiculous it is.
>Yes, you're right about me not investigating and steel-manning the arguments from the other side. However, I think it's a mistake to do so as you cannot deal with fascism by discussion, reasoned argument and logic.
More charitably, the signaling could be: “keep the government as small as possible, but no smaller than that”, i.e. use things that basically mostly work and quit expending resources addressing every edge case, particularly when it’s performative (slight font variations) rather than obvious (a ramp to get into a public building)
That's very charitable--especially considering that leaving the font alone in the first place would have been the smaller option.
And don't get me started about the current meddling of the executive in my private life? I haven't had a more intrusive administration since living in Singapore.
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 Calibri are not the only two possible choices.
Maybe the government should make up their own (hopefully public domain) font, which would be suitable for their purposes (and avoiding needing proprietary fonts), and use that instead.
Good question, with a little searching I found that, in true DOGE fashion, there exists an executive order announcing a new "National Design Studio" which is tasked with updating USWDS
So why fonts are being managed by Rubio and not the Chief Design Officer is anyone's guess
Yeah it’s fascist looking as hell, and they’re the ones that have been registering all these rando program domains. So, so dumb - if only because it’s redundant and wasteful.
With such inspiring copy as
“What's the biggest brand in the world? If you said Trump, you're not wrong. But what's the foundation of that brand? One that's more globally recognized than practically anything else.
It's the nation…where he was born. It's the United States of America.” how can you go wrong?
The funniest part of this site is talking about how important design is, and then having one bad quality video of a US flag and a bunch of giant text fading into view while scrolling. It's giving "graphic design is my passion"
I'm no expert but "We've been conditioned to accept that mediocre in government is normal." reads terribly.
Surely it should be "...that mediocrity in..." or even "...that mediocre government..." or even "...that being mediocre in...". All of those are better!
edit: this text is a mess. "It's time to upgrade, and fix the nation's digital potholes." That comma is nonsense.
> edit: this text is a mess. "It's time to upgrade, and fix the nation's digital potholes." That comma is nonsense.
I assume they wanted to look smart in the sense "look at us, we used the oxford comma" without actually understanding that the oxford comma needs 3 or more elements listed to be an actual oxford comma.
> AN OFFICIAL WEBSITE OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT
> What's the biggest brand in the world? If you said Trump, you're not wrong.
This is beyond satire by now, it reminds me of Idi Amin and his official title:
His full self-bestowed title ultimately became: "His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, CBE, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular"
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.
a) It's a smoke screen. Do something bombastic and provocative so that the opposition chews on that while something else more "important" passes undetected.
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.
The irony here is that Steve Jobs _did_ actually think about fonts. Sure, he certainly didn't think about Times New Roman, but I disagree with the idea that someone at the top should not have time to write a quick memo about trivialities if it bothers them.
(Part of) Steve Jobs' job was to deliver a great operating system, and part of that relates to how fonts are used. No part of the President's job involves picking a font, let alone legislating around it, unless there are actual political factors involved.
> That's like the CEO of Microsoft having meeting about coding conventions, space vs tabs, variable name format etc.
No. Those things aren't exposed to the public. But the UI is:
___
Bill Gates:
So I went to Windows update. Windows Update decides I need to download a bunch of controls. (Not) just once but multiple times where I get to see weird dialog boxes.
Doesn’t Windows update know some key to talk to Windows?
Then I did the scan. This took quite some time and I was told it was critical for me to download 17megs of stuff.
This is after I was told we were doing delta patches to things but instead just to get 6 things that are labeled in the SCARIEST possible way I had to download 17meg.
So I did the download. That part was fast. Then it wanted to do an install. This took 6 minutes and the machine was so slow I couldn’t use it for anything else during this time.
What the heck is going on during those 6 minutes? That is crazy. This is after the download was finished.
Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night — why should I reboot at that time?
So I did the reboot because it INSISTED on it. Of course that meant completely getting rid of all my Outlook state.
So I got back up and running and went to Windows Update again. I forgot why I was in Windows Update at all since all I wanted was to get Moviemaker.
So I went back to Microsoft.com and looked at the instructions. I have to click on a folder called WindowsXP. Why should I do that? Windows Update knows I am on Windows XP.
You want to know what the global impression of the US is right now? Here's a translated quote from a newspaper today, from a source in our military:
> – The US has the most qualified intelligence organizations in the world at its disposal. Both the CIA and the FBI have been politicized under the current regime. I find it difficult to see how we will be able to maintain the trusting cooperation we have had with the US in the past after this.
The actions of the current administration speaks far louder than any font ever could, and it's tearing down decades of good will and trust.
The Global impression of the US is down the toilet. This only adds to that. I kept being told that I was not American, and America didn't care what the rest of the world thought. Which is it?
Speaking as someone who is not from the US I can say that the global impression of the US is not helped by the secretary of state bikeshedding about fonts. There are important issues of foreign affairs that need thought and attention at this time.
That's not the point at all and I think you know that.
A big part of leadership is conveying priorities. This says "What's important isn't Israel, Venezuela, Russia/Ukraine, China, it's that you used Calibri in compiling a document." It is the very definition of form over substance.
It's an interesting thought, given what current global impressions are.
I'm imagining a scenario in which the President of the United States is doing his usual sort of diplomatic outreach, consisting of waffling incoherently about things he's heard on TV that he doesn't like about their country. At one point he loses his train of thought and starts bragging about how well he's doing in cognitive adequacy tests. The diplomats are waiting until the bit where they get to flatter and bribe him at the end, the bit where he usually reverses his foreign policy, so long as they can get him to understand what they're actually asking from him. One of them speculates whether it's even possible that half the country is actually dumber than this guy.
A staffer wearing a MAGA baseball cap sidles up to them with some briefing notes. And its just impossible not to notice the notes are typeset in the very same venerable font that was once used as the default for Windows 9x.
The diplomats are stunned. No sans serif wokeness here. The typeface exudes heritage and gravitas. At last they realize what a very serious adminstration they're dealing with.
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.
On the Web I see very frequently foreign names, user handles or URLs where I am confused about whether there is an I or an l, because that Web page has chosen to use a bad sans serif font that does not differentiate these letters.
Sometimes there is no problem because the words or links containing ambiguous letters can be copied and pasted. Other times there is an annoying problem because either the stupid designer has disabled copying (or like in the output of Google and some other search engines, copying does not copy the visible text, but a link that cannot be used in a different context, outside the browser), or because I want to write on my computer a link or name that I have received on my phone.
I disabled fonts on the web browser on my computer, in order to avoid that and other problems. I also disabled the display of non-ASCII characters in URLs (which required adding some codes to make it do that; the built-in settings will only work for the domain name and not the rest of the URL), and changed the font used for URLs, which also helps.
Yeah I understand it's an issue other places but I don't think it's actually a significant issue in government documents and forms written in English which is the usecase here. The choice doesn't have to satisfy all requirements it just needs to be a good choice for government writing.
The crossbar of a t is not a serif, but those of the capital I are definitely serifs.
Only on computer screens it is possible to confuse serifs with crossbars, because of the very low resolution, which forces the increase of the width of a serif to 1 pixel, possibly making it as wide as a crossbar.
To convince yourself that capital I has serifs and not crossbars, just look at high-resolution photos of some Roman imperial inscriptions, like that on Trajan's column, which are the gold standard for the design of the capital letters in serif fonts.
Most letters of the Latin script are made of 3 elements, thick lines, thin lines and serifs. The width ratio between the thick lines and the thin lines is called the contrast of the font.
Serif fonts normally have a higher contrast and sans serif fonts not only have no serifs, but they also have no contrast or only a low contrast.
Serifs are even thinner than the thin lines (which include some of the crossbars), except in sans serif fonts (which have no serifs) and slab serifs fonts (where the serifs are as thick as the thin lines).
Both the sans serif and the slab serif fonts are fonts typical for the 19th century after the Napoleonian wars, when they were used mainly for advertising, where they attracted attention due to their anomalous serifs and they also allowed a lower cost by using cheap paper and printing machines, which would not have rendered well the standard serif fonts.
In several programmer fonts, where most characters are sans serif, a few characters are made slab serif, i.e. with serifs that are as thick as a crossbar, with the purpose of distinguishing them clearly from similar characters. Thus capital I is made with thick serifs looking like crossbars, even if that is not the standard capital I shape. The reason is less to distinguish it from l, which should have a low hook even in sans-serif typefaces, but to distinguish it better from vertical bar, which is important in programming languages.
Moreover, because such programmer fonts are fixed-pitch, a few narrow characters have slab serifs that do not exist in variable-pitch fonts, in order to avoid excessive areas of white space between letters. Such slab serifs added for blackening are put at the top of the small i, j and l letters, not only on capital I (but on the small letters the slab serifs are unilateral, not bilateral, like on capital I). Such extra slab serifs on the narrow characters are inherited from the type-writing machines, where they had the purpose to diminish the pressure of the hammer hitting the paper, to avoid making holes in the paper.
You are right, but if legibility had been the reason for change, Times New Roman is a rather poor choice, even if better than Calibri.
Among Microsoft typefaces, Georgia would have been much better than Times New Roman, especially when read on displays, but even when printed.
There are of course even better choices, but Georgia is a familiar typeface for most people, it is similar enough to Times New Roman and the older versions of Georgia are free to use by anybody.
Georgia is not as condensed as Times New Roman, but here Times New Roman is the anomaly, as it is more condensed than a normal font, for the purpose of fitting within narrow newspaper columns.
From Windows 3.0 to Windows 98, I have used Times New Roman as my main text font in documents, because Windows did not include anything better, but immediately after the introduction of the superior Georgia I replaced Times New Roman with it for some years, until eventually I stopped relying on the bundled typefaces and I have bought some typefaces that I liked more, for use in all my documents. (Windows 3.0 did not have yet TTF fonts, with which the licensed Times New Roman was introduced later, but it already had a metrically equivalent Times font).
See this policy of return to Times New Roman really works. People are debating particular letters after (both) rulings have been made instead of the fact that president protects pedophiles.
> 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 is a long tradition of fonts being a little ambiguous in that space.
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.
> Using a sans serif font generally helps anyone with difficulty distinguishing letters so dyslexic, low vision, aging vision etc.
So far as I'm aware, there is very little actual evidence to support this oft-repeated claim. It all seems to lead back to this study of 46 individuals, the Results section of which smells of p-hacking.
> 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.
Legal language is natural language with particular domain-specific technical jargon; like other uses of natural language, it targets humans who are quite capable of resolving ambiguity via context and not compilers and interpreters that are utterly incapable of doing so.
Not that official State Department communication is mostly “legal language” as distinct from more general formal use of natural language to start with.
No, because normal people can read "l00l" as a number just fine and don't actually care if the underlying encoding is different. AI won't care either. It's just us on-the-spectrum nerds with our archaic deterministic devices and brains trained on them that get wound up about it. Designing a font for normal readers is just fine.
You lost this fight more than a century ago. Helvetica and almost all related grotesque fonts lack a serif on "I", and dominate modern typography. You see them everywhere, on every device. Pull your phone out your pocket and see if you can see "crossbars" on the I. They're not there, and never have been.
And people like it this way! So that's why we design fonts like this.
"Only when used in a context where they can be confused."
So what are you supposed to when you're typing along and suddenly you find yourself in such a context? Switch the font of that one occurrence? That document? Your whole publishing effort?
Capital "i"s without crossbars aren't capital "i"s. They're lower-case Ls. Any font that doesn't recognize this should be rejected.
> Capital "i"s without crossbars aren't capital "i"s. They're lower-case Ls. Any font that doesn't recognize this should be rejected.
You have asserted this at least thrice in the past thirty minutes. What makes you feel so strongly about it? "Rejected" for what purpose? Do you understand that you've just trashed Helvetica, to take a famous example?
You know the fonts on our roads are standardized? And a lot of other official documents?
Designing a font that will be public domain forever costs next to nothing. It's a one-time cost that pays dividends into the future and that will probably outlive us.
The government would create something standard and accessible, and anyone could use it. No encumbered licensing.
I think companies refreshing design systems is a waste of money, but the government doing it is actually incredibly prudent.
Only because of corruption, which should be dealt with of course, but that's a totally separate issue that doesn't invalidate the act of making an open font.
Neither Calibri nor Times New Roman are free to use, although they are free in certain contexts for Windows users. The US Government is paying plenty for them.
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 english is mostly gibberish these days because hardly anyone uses a pen anymore! However, it is mostly "cursive" and cursive is not the same as serif and sans.
English prides itself on not having diacritics, or accents or whatever that thing where you merge a A and E is called, unless they are borrowed: in which case all bets are off; or there is an r in the month and the moon is in Venus.
So you want a font and it needs to look lovely. If your O and 0 are not differentiated then you have failed. 2:Z?, l:L:1? Good.
I use a german style slash across the number seven when I write the number, even though my number one is nothing like a german one, which looks more like a lambda. I also slash a lone capital Zed. I slash a zero: 0 and dot an O when writing code on paper. Basically, when I write with a pen you are in absolutely no doubt what character I have written, unless the DTs kick in 8)
I cross my sevens, slash my zeros, and use a hook on lowercase T to avoid confusion with plus signs. I think I developed the hook-T habit in college math classes.
That's good, because the "O" should never be dotted. You use slash OR dot for zero, unless you vaguely remember them both as useful for disambiguating but forgot that both marks are for zero and vary by typeface. Mostly dotted zero was just during the dot matrix era. I wouldn't mind being shown counter examples.
What I had done sometimes when writing slashed zero by a pencil and needed the disambiguation (which is not that common in my writing but it does happen sometimes that it will be important), is for the slash the other way for zero, to avoid being confused with slashed O or the symbol for empty sets. Atkinson Hyperlegible font (mentioned in another comment) also works that way, too; the slash for zero is the other way than the slashed O in languages that use that.
> English prides itself on not having diacritics, or accents or whatever that thing where you merge a A and E is called, unless they are borrowed
Its called the letter “ash” and its borrowed from... (Old) English. Though its functionally reverted to being a ligature, which is what is was before it was a letter.
(Also, English has &, which was a letter even more recently—its current name being taken from the way it was recited as part of the alphabet [“and, per se, and”], including the effect of slurring with speed—and which also originated as a ligature.)
The use of the "font" spelling variant rather than "fount" is any case a clearer indication of etymology.
After all, a "fount" of types refers not to its role as a fountain of printing (fons fontis L -> fontaine OF -> fountain) but the pouring out, melting and casting of lead (fundo fundere fudu fusum [fused!] L -> fondre / fonte F).
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".
To be honest, the first moment I saw the page, it did seem to give my eyes a negative reaction, but after reading a few of the results, it started to look fine pretty quickly.
I'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.
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 1930's. Fuck me, it was hard to read those excerpts. But it is what it is. OCR could've converted the font. The problem is, is the OCR accurate? Like, is my search with keywords having a good SnR, or am I missing out on evidence?
Personally, Times New Roman was likely the reason I did not like Mozilla Thunderbird. I have to look into that.
> The default font shouldn't be about aesthetics, it should be first and foremost about usability.
The thing about usability is that it's both objective and subjective, and one can argue that aesthetics is part of usability. For example, I find writing code much more pleasant with Comic Code font, and I can imagine that there are other people that would hate it.
Sure but I think we could agree it looking nice ranks lower than being structurally more difficult to read for people? If there were a freely preinstalled option that was both sure but given the choice between functional and aesthetic readability wins hands down.
Off topic but did you find anything interesting? I spent a few days researching Holodomor and was surprised how poorly understood it still is even today, and badly reported at the time. Good propaganda case study. There’s a dramatic film about the reporting too, Mr. Jones (2019).
I haven't researched it explicitly, but I do come across "what happens in the wider world" notices in small historical newspapers and sometimes I search to see what it was about. Saw a mention about some general winning an important victory, searched his name, found out he was one of the whites, and the first thing claimed about him was that he only came in "once the war was already lost".
What I found was that yes, it was reported about, but very little. The notable person who did research the event, Gareth Jones, is indeed an interesting story (he was also referenced to by the newspapers). I believe it was underreported, but we could've known. Helped, now that is a different question I don't dare to answer. The Soviets used disgusting tactics in Eastern Europe, see the book Bloodlands.
Printed document isn't what I was on about. There the default should 100% be about accessibility (and then we just want that by default cause we're used to it).
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.
I think it would be a smaller issue if it only applied to digital media. Presumably though this applies to all media.
And I can certainly confirm that changing the font of PDF will almost always result in a unreadable mess. Something about how a PDF doesn't have text "blocks" and instead fixes each character making text reflow almost impossible.
The Dutch dev of Calibri commented on the history [1].
He makes a couple of good points, nuances. The main one I liked is related to your premise: it was that the Times New Roman font was optimized for printing newspapers whereas his successor was meant for computer screens.
Ultimately, IMO this is just bullying people with bad eyesight and dyslexia (and said bullying I can only regard as hatred towards minorities which reminds me of a different era). My father had MS and due to that bad eyesight. He had special glasses with a special lens to read. Of course any font change has a learning curve, but to me this just hits home as I've seen him struggle to read.
He passed away ten years ago, the glasses were custom-made in 70's or so. He'd close one eye and use the other (better suited for this). He'd have tremors, including in the eyes. Reading made him very tired, eventually a friend would read complex beta literature before him. To me (as kid) the glasses felt like a huge looking glass.
A friend of my parents also made a custom card deck, with huge symbols and letters. That way, we could work around his disability. We always had to work around his disability, and it regressed but slow variant and he was also too old to get the medicine which effectively stopped the MS from getting worse. However, it meant other people who had the quick version or were younger got more QoL.
I don't think he ever used Calibri. I mean, at that time, he wasn't into computers anymore. He had all kind of health isssues due to MS. It pains me to think people like him now have more difficulty to read letters because of BS decisions like these just cause NIH or whatever the silly reason must be. But there's also good news: if it is digital, they can override the font and such.
Sounds like he had lots of good people around him helping him.
The technical aspects you mention are important. I have diplopia, and also close one eye. It gets worse in the evenings. I love paper books and own many, but all my reading now is on a Kindle, with a huge font. It makes it so much easier.
Times New Roman was designed for a time when printing quality was not that good. With 1080p screen nowadays, that barrier is removed, so optimization of readability has different constraints.
I'd say changing something for vague aesthetic reasons is far more wasteful than doing so to make things more accessible. Compare the cost of installing a curb cut vs. filling it back in because you think a straight curb looks "stronger."
serif vs sans serif is not "a vague aesthetic reason", it's the most fundamental typeface choice you can make, moreso than monospace (which is an artifact of some 19th century technology) Rubio is an attorney, and there are many stylistic conventions in the legal and judicial space, why ruffle those feathers by flouting them? if you are given a style guide for your PhD thesis, do you follow it or do you futz endlessly with the fonts to show them what an independent thinker you are?
Whether or not serifs actually make text harder to read, at least there is some plausible justification for the original change. Maybe it was stupid at the time, but it's done.
The justification here is petty and wasteful on its face.
No one said it can't be changed back. No one called anyone weird or Hitler. They just said that "it was wasteful to change it from X to Y, so I'm changing it from Y back to X" isn't a logical argument.
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.
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 a new font for the purpose.
(I personally much prefer Times New Roman to Calibri for printed documents, but that’s neither here nor there.)
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)
This is my view as well. That being said, Time New Roman is marginally better because there are several good, modern open source alternatives with the same metrics that can be substituted. And there's good tool support virtually everywhere for those alternatives, like in TeX.
There is a metric-compatible open alternative to Calibri (Carlito) but it seems more vulnerable to lawyer shenanigans and doesn't have extensive tool support.
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.
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.
Paganis are beautifully designed cars, but the labelling of buttons and toggles inside the center console look cheap (IMO) because their font seems straight out of a quickly made flyer designed by bored teacher who just discovered Word Art.
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 variable than most biological quantities, so in the end general rules are the best one can really do.
Here of course, it's nothing more than rearranging the deck chairs, while the captain targets the next iceberg "to teach the ice a lesson!"
I want to read a study that compares what readers estimate for much effort was put into producing the same page of text in two contemporary and basic serif and sans-serif fonts. My hypothesis is that the serif font is viewed as more polished or refined, and therefore the result of more hours of work. But I could be wrong.
This is in-line with the advice here to use serif for long form and sans for short. When you're making signs and things like that, you don't have the repeated forms to inform your ability to interpret letters, so the serifs act to confuse readers, while in long form, they add flair, which could be more artistic and tasteful.
Reuters calling the switch a "font" change instead of a typeface change is troubling, though consistent with a society that now casually refers to all pasta as "spaghetti". A typeface is the design; a font is its specific instance. This is basic knowledge, taught to children, houseplants, and most domesticated goats.
A simple correction would stop this spiral, but Reuters appears committed to forging a bold new era in which terminology is chosen at random, like drawing Scrabble tiles from a bag and declaring them journalism.
I’m a professional graphic designer, people in the industry use font, type and typeface interchangeably. No one goes “Umm Actually…”
you should also tell that to who wrote css, because font-weight doesn’t make sense if a font is already a specific weight. Words mean something specific until they don’t and the meaning changes over time and that’s okay
Originally, a font (also spelled fount, at least formerly) was a physical thing: a collection of metal slugs, each bearing the reversed shape of a letter or other symbol (a glyph, in typographical parlance). You would arrange these slugs in a wooden frame, apply a layer of ink to them, and press them against a sheet of paper.
The typeface dictated the shapes of those glyphs. So you could own a font of Caslon's English Roman typeface, for example. If you wanted to print text in different sizes, you would need multiple fonts. If you wanted to print in italic as well as roman (upright), you would need another font for that, too.
As there was a finite number of slugs available, what text you could print on a single sheet was also constrained to an extent by your font(s). Modern Welsh, for example, has no letter "k": yet mediaeval Welsh used it liberally. The change came when the Bible was first printed in Welsh: the only fonts available were made for English, and didn't have enough k's. So the publisher made the decision to use c for k, and an orthographical rule was born.
Digital typography, of course, has none of those constraints: digital text can be made larger or smaller, or heavier or lighter, or slanted or not, by directly manipulating the glyph shapes; and you're not going to run out of a particular letter.
So that raises the question: what is a font in digital terms?
There appear to be two schools of thought:
1. A font is a typeface at a particular size and in a particular weight etc. So Times New Roman is a typeface, but 12pt bold italic Times New Roman is a font. This attempts to draw parallels with the physical constraints of a moveable-type font.
2. A font is, as it always was, the instantiation of a typeface. In digital terms, this means a font file: a .ttf or .otf or whatever. This may seem like a meaningless distinction, but consider: you can get different qualities of font files for the same typeface. A professional, paid-for font will (or should, at least) offer better kerning and spacing rules, better glyph coverage, etc. And if you want your text italic or bold, or particularly small or particularly large (display text), your software can almost certainly just digitally transform the shapes in your free/cheap, all-purpose font, But you will get better results with a font that has been specifically designed to be small or italic or whatever: text used for small captions, for example, is more legible with a larger x-height and less variation in stroke width than that used for body text. Adobe offers 65 separate fonts for its Minion typeface, in different combinations of italic/roman, weight (regular/medium/semibold/bold), width (regular/condensed) and size (caption/body/subhead/display).
In my experience, "font" is the colloquial term referring to either. Programmers get to demand precision, for journalists it's a bit tougher. The de facto meaning of terms does, unfortunately, evolve in sometimes arbitrary ways. And it's tough to fight.
If all DoS documents are prepared with the same software or software suite (e.g. MS Office), isn't that a distinction without much of a difference? They've gone back to using TNR.ttf instead of Calibri.ttf (or whatever the files are actually called).
Which Times does Rubio want: There's a NY version, and a Chicago version.
I got politely informed to not use NYTimes font in a paper I turned-in when I was in college. On that occasion, it was an accident. I'd taken the file to school to print, and my owiginal font selection had been replaced by the default. My professor merely said that it is hard to read by people with older eyes.
Several years later, I understand. My default font is now set for Liberation Sans. I have trouble reading 'decorative' fonts. For printouts, I use Liberation Mono.
If I remember correctly Microsoft did a bunch of studies back in the day and found the Calibri had some of the best readability across a range of visibility and reading impairments (like dyslexia).
Serif fonts have some readability features of their own, specifically for printed word.
You are correct. Microsoft invested significantly to create a modern properly designed font that is easy to read on a variety of screens, prints clearly and consistently, scales well, and can do italics, bold, etc well.
I think this came out back with Office 2007 or something. I believe Aptos is actually the new next generation font that should generally be considered an enhancement to Calibri.
While Microsoft isnt great at many things, their investment in font design and support is outstanding.
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.
I don't have link on that, but the main difficulty with OCR isn't the OCR part (not anymore at least), it's the "clean up" part, and serifs are a pain in the ass, especially on sightly crumpled paper. My use case was an ERP plugin that digitalized and read to receipt to autofill reimbursement demands, and since most receipt use sans-serif fonts, it was mostly fine, but some jokers use serifed font (mostly on receipts you get when using cash, not credit card receipts) and the error rate jumped from like 1% to 13% (not sure about the 1%, it might be a story i told myself to make me feel better, it was a decade ago, before i pivoted to network from AI. I always take the best decision it seems)
https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10220037: [Figure 5 shows higher accuracy for the two sans-serif fonts, Arial and DejaVu compared to Times New Roman, across all OCR engines]
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
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.
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.
> the slightly higher density of the Times version (compare row by row)
I don't think that's the comparison you want to draw? The rows appear to hold very similar amounts of text.
But the rows on the left, in Times New Roman, are shorter than the rows on the right. So even though "one row" holds the same amount of text, one column-inch of Times New Roman holds more rows.
The Times New Roman looks more readable to me because it has thicker strokes. This isn't really an issue in a digital font; you can't accidentally apply a thin layer of black to a pixel and let the color underneath show through.
(We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46224867. It's fine and interesting, but the offtopicness of you-know-who is a bit too agitating at the top of the thread.)
If you read the article, Calibri usage was instituted during the Biden administration. So, there's probably a diversity of government styles that get involved with typefaces.
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...
I guess if Russia invaded Western Europe and Putin decided to switch from Cyrillic to Latin script so the subjugated peoples would more easily read and learn Russian, that would be neutral too?
About the "bad argument", I can't argue with you, because I'm not the one arguing. You'll have to take it up with the author of these lines:
"In a hundred years, our language will be the European language. The nations of the east, the north and the west will, to communicate with us, learn our language. The prerequisite for this: The script called Gothic is replaced by the script we have called Latin so far"
(Besides, what's so strange about transposing Cyrillic to Latin? It happens all the time even today when people don't want to or can't switch keyboard layouts.)
I tend to agree with you, many people are passionate about typefaces, and dictators are no exception. [Passion about typeface] seems to be a low-signal detector for dictators. I'm passionate about lasagna, and I'll bet Mussolini was too -- but that probably doesn't mean I'm a fascist.
But if you go around and tell everyone you meet that they're doing it wrong and that lasagna MUST be prepared exactly the way you do it, because it's the one and only right way, then you're a lasagna-nazi :)
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.
I'm not sure why you mention consistency. The cable explicitly says it's a) for the decorum and b) anti dei. That's literally the same reason for the music restrictions - that's why I'm bringing it up.
> He just didn't like the font so he ordered it to be changed.
There is your answer. He imposed his will - that's what dictators do. You have to be careful when the reason for any costly change is one individual's personal preferences. It's a bad omen.
> Equivalent to your boss ordering tabs be used instead of spaces.
That's not always equivalent, especially if it is to set a standard. Obviously, some people using spaces and the others using tabs is not ideal in situations you're referring to. It's also fine to change the standard, if they find a significant problem with the current convention. But if your boss wants it changed, and their only explanation is their dislike of the status-quo, then that's a red flag. The problem isn't very serious right now, but could grow into one in the future and you have to be on the watch.
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.
Not. The problem is not even about which font is actually more accessible. It's the self proclaimed reasoning. Rubio, by his own words, states that the change is about aesthetics and anti DEIA politics.
However, if you want to argue about actual accessibility, which is not what is happening in the Dept. of State, the US government's own accessibility guidelines contradict the idea that Serif fonts are more accessible; https://www.section508.gov/develop/fonts-typography/
Do you happen to know anyone with a reading disability at all? A dear friend of mine has dyslexia, and I've seen first hand how important this stuff is for his comprehension.
Should text be made less accessible to read for everybody else, in order to accommodate people with dyslexia? Because everybody who reads a lot prefers serif fonts, since they are easier to read. That's why books are printed in serifs.
Since it's all digital, this all shouldn't be a problem in 2025.
While mostly framed as a matter of clarity and formality in presentation, Mr. Rubio’s directive to all diplomatic posts around the world blamed “radical” diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs for what he said was a misguided and ineffective switch from the serif typeface Times New Roman to sans serif Calibri in official department paperwork.
In an “Action Request” memo obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Rubio said that switching back to the use of Times New Roman would “restore decorum and professionalism to the department’s written work.” Calibri is “informal” when compared to serif typefaces like Times New Roman, the order said, and “clashes” with the department’s official letterhead.
As far back as I can recall, this is a politician who has railed against 'political correctness'.
The thing is that some section of the right has convinced itself that Calibre is some DEI font. Meanwhile the rest of the world is just living life and having to deal with people getting this worked up about the default font of Microsoft Office since what, 2008?
It's incredibly generous to so many future plaintiffs to have this overt hostility to the very concept of accessibility and fairness and put in writing, so many times and in so many ways.
> When Times New Roman appears in a book, document, or advertisement, it connotes apathy. It says, “I submitted to the font of least resistance.” Times New Roman is not a font choice so much as the absence of a font choice, like the blackness of deep space is not a color. To look at Times New Roman is to gaze into the void.
> If you have a choice about using Times New Roman, please stop. Use something else.
> Like Cambria, Calibri works well on screen. But in print, its rounded corners make body text look soft. If you need a clean sans serif font, you have better options.
- - -
To telegraph an identity, TNR is a good choice for this administration; so, credit where due, well played. Still, I would have gone with Comic Sans.
For about ten years I worked for composition shops, and eventually for a maker of typesetting systems. Through blurred eyes I could tell TNR from Baskerville from Garamond from Janson from ... Some of these fonts I can still identify.
But I have no idea what font was used in the book I just finished reading or the book that I'm returning to later today. My main question about a font is whether I can read it with old eyes.
I do agree that designers should care about these matters. I'll add that for some portion of the reading public TNR more likely means The New Republic than Times New Roman.
[Five minutes later: the book just finished, What We Can Know by Ian McEwan, appears to be set in Palatino, never a favorite of mine. The one I'm returning to, I'm not sure.]
People like this makes me want to use Times New Roman more. Maybe not Butterick specifically (the website is fine), but all those people that make a blog and pick a font before even knowing what they even want to write. Most of the time people change the default my web browser has, they make things worse. For a font choice to be any kind of personal expression in my eyes, you first need everything else in place: content, layout, design.
To spite these people I force the use of Arial on the worst offenders. The list is now a couple of thousand websites long.
Oh, I could have picked a other font. I just get a smug feeling when forcing these websites to use Arial. The main reason for using another font on these web pages is that their own choices are worse than not changing it. So that list of thousands of web pages is to make their web pages legible and more usable, not just to be a prick.
I picked Arial so that I could tell the web pages apart from those who had the good taste to leave my web browsers standard font alone. I don't mind arial.
Perhaps your smug feeling can cancel out the smug feeling the author/publisher had when picking a font before even knowing what they even want to write.
It's important to keep the smugness balanced, thanks for doing your part.
> Most of the time people change the default my web browser has, they make things worse.
In Firefox: Settings → Fonts → Advanced… → untick Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above. I’ve been running this way for almost six years now; it makes the web so much better.
When there's an HN link to some philosophy website that intentionally only uses lower-case letters, an obscure font, and yellow on green color scheme, with a page explaining those choices
In the context of documents, the lack of font choice regarding Times New Roman could be partly attributed to the fact that it was the default font on Microsoft Word until 2007. The irony is, of course, that it was replaced by none other than Calibri.
I definitely was thinking of Comic Sans. Both in terms of the horrible typeface and the “not funny” connotation of the name. (Yeah I know sans is referring to lack of serif)
The Times New Roman commentary could have been true back when it was written, but now Calibri is the default for Microsoft Word, and has been for a long while (almost 20 years). So choosing Calibri is the path of least resistance.
I enjoyed the argument that this is going to open up a new time point for digital forensics. Many people have doctored documents pretending to have made them in the past. Except they did not realize that the vintage software used font X, but the modern default is now Y. There have been a few court cases where essentially someone is able to say, “This font is clearly Calibri which did not exist at the time this document was supposedly printed.”
If you are a Deep Space 9 fan, this is where you get to scream, “It’s a fake!!!”
I like serif fonts, but never liked Times New Roman too much. Printed, in high resolution, it is kind of ok, but I absolutely abhor it on displays. Which is where we read things 99% of the time nowadays.
This is why I'm seriously considering learning Chinese. Next 50 years won't be US lead.
When senior government officials are spending time & public mindshare/attention on whether a particular font is or is not diverse then you know it is game over.
The details don't matter...this being a topic at all is the news
I know they're leveraged to the hilt, their demographics are shaky AF etc.
...but end of the day productive capacity is what matters. I don't see anyone close on that mix of pace, tech, low cost, ability to execute and scale.
A strong argument could be made on any of those metrics that someone could beat them fair and square, but the whole blend...there is nobody even competing in same league and that lead looks like it'll last rest of my lifetime
Every major country's demographics are shaky. Japan and S.Korea are already shrinking. The US is propped up by, uh, low-quality immigration, and fertility has nevertheless dropped to record lows. The large countries of Europe are either basket-cases, tinderboxes, or both. Germany and Italy haven't had above-replacement TFR since 1970!
China's not doing great, but having a population reservoir of 1.4B can make up for a lot of deficiencies. If everybody shrinks or becomes utterly dysfunctional, I'd bet that a vast, productive, essentially monoethnic nation weathers the storm better than the rest.
"[Rubio] ...calling his predecessor Antony Blinken's decision to adopt Calibri a "wasteful" diversity move..."
Bro what. It was the default font in Microsoft for many years thus, it was the default font for most office software for many years -- just like Times New Roman was before.
The article says it's better than Times New Roman because it's easier to read for those with disabilities - so of course the government needs to make things worse for them. Wonder if someone could sue over these kinds of changes that are being deliberately made to be less accessible.
Is that even true? The article is really vague on the type of disability and basically just claims that serifs are harder to read.
Generally sans-serif is advisable for small sizes, although I assume the main things are large open counters, tall x-height and low stroke contrast.
I’ve often read that dyslexics favor strongly distinctive characters and “grounded”, bottom-heavy letterforms. I feel like serifs actually sound pretty good there.
It’s also important to consider whether such studies were conducted before or after high-PPI displays became prevalent and leveled the playing field for serifs.
The wiki explicitly mension the typical sans disadvantage: "One potential source of confusion in Calibri is a visible homoglyph, a pair of easily confused characters: the lowercase letter L and the uppercase letter i (l and I) of the Latin script are effectively indistinguishable."
So while I prefer Calibri as TNR has been the default for longer and hence is more boring to me, I can understand people might prefer a serif font for readability.
Yeah. I have a dis-a-bility. It’s now 2200 and I’ve been working since 0830. My eyes are tired and these 8’s look like 0’s, 5’s look like 6’s. What a tool.
Does anyone else like to change the font on news articles using Inspect Element?
Also in Word etc, if I've got to spend a lot of time in a large document, I'll usually edit the paragraph body style temporarily to something sans serif. It's just better on screen.
I never liked Calibri when it was pushed aggressively by MS and showed up everywhere - I prefer Arial or Helvetica for sans-serif, and think TNR is a good default for serif, with Computer Modern a close second.
Looking through a selection of papers on serif vs non-serif fonts the conclusions seem to be that there is little difference when printed, but when viewing on-screen sans-serif is preferred.
> "This formatting standard aligns with the President’s One Voice for America’s Foreign Relations directive, underscoring the Department’s responsibility to present a unified, professional voice in all communications," it added.
This administration truly sets a high standard for professional communication...
> S.V. Dáte, HuffPost’s senior White House correspondent, asked the White House earlier this month who suggested Budapest, Hungary, as the location for an upcoming meeting between Trump and Putin. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt responded: “Your mom did.” White House Communications Director Steven Cheung then followed up: “Your mom.”
Times New Roman, Arial, Courier New, Calibri, Cambria… all of these fonts are proprietary.
But there are open-source metrically-compatible alternatives to all of them, commonly included in Linux distributions and/or office suites like LibreOffice.
> The department under Blinken in early January 2023 had switched to Calibri, a modern sans-serif font, saying this was a more accessible font for people with disabilities
That's interesting because I've long been under the impression that serif fonts promoted easier reading. As such, serif fonts could / should be considered more accessible.
Why is this a story? I'm fairly certain fonts change all of the time. Oh right, it's because they can't just make the change, they have to say something stupid about it. Republican voters, how are you not insulted? Is this really all it takes to get you to that voting booth?
Besides all the daily stuff that happens with the current US government, I'm _really_ excited (not in the best way) to see how the citizens of the USA, Europe and the whole world will deal with the aftermaths of the current government.
Funny but my impression is that these days kerning is usually pretty bad with Serifed fonts in, at the very least, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Publisher, Microsoft Powerpoint, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Illustrator.
It is not so bad if you are using it for paragraphs but I can't stand the way serifed fonts come out if I am setting display text for a poster unless I manually take over and adjust the kerning. After I had this problem I was wondering if I was the only one or what other people did so I looked at posters people had put up around campus and had a really hard time finding posters where people were using serifed fonts in large sizes and my guess is people either start out with sans or they tried something with serifs but changed their mind because it looked wrong.
I could consider anti-DEI sentiment that 'people jumping the lane' as morally acceptable (valid by itself but based on wrong assumptions), but this, this is just evil. Like why would you change font because it is harder to read for someone?
"Decorum" and Times New Roman. That's the equivalent of pointlessly plastering everything with marble and gold, you think you are doing Roman Empire meets Versailles, but ultimately, you're just being tacky.
Speaking of DEI:
Stanley Morison, the inventor of Times New Roman, in collaboration with Victor Lardent, was one of the founders of The Guild of the Pope's Peace, an organization created to promote Pope Benedict XV's calls for peace in the face of the First World War. On the imposition of conscription in 1916 during First World War, he was a conscientious objector, and was imprisoned. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Morison#Early_life_and...>
For a moment I thought it had something to do with "Cuadernillos Rubio" [1]. They are small workbooks quite common in Spain for kids to learn how to write. However, the font they use is not Times New Roman...
The verbiage in the PR reminds me of a bit from The Night Watch [1]:
> [...] and at some
point, you will have to decide whether serifs are daring statements of modernity, or tools of hegemonic oppression that implicitly support feudalism and illiteracy
> calling his predecessor Antony Blinken's decision to adopt Calibri a "wasteful" diversity move,
> The department under Blinken in early January 2023 had switched to Calibri, a modern sans-serif font,
> saying this was a more accessible font for people with disabilities
Man, helping disabled people is so woke. Who was the woke politician who made the government support disabled americans?
How far has the migration away from TNR to Calibri progressed? Is it redoing everything or is it just abandoning an incomplete ongoing migration that mostly just started?
I still can’t believe they switched to Calibri at all; the only people who should be using Calibri are people who don’t realize that Microsoft Word lets you pick other fonts.
I do wish they’d gone for a classier serif though; Garamond was right there.
There's Clickbait and then this awful headline designed to give people heart attacks.
Who care about fonts? Boring.
Why not jazz it up by mentioning coups during an administration that previously tried to pull of a coup attempt. Any administration officials names and coup should not be in the same sentence unless they attempt another one(or unless it's talking about the previous one).
There was an event (or events?) in the past, when some past documents were forged, but with the default (in MS Word, I suppose) Calibre font, which was released years later. I wonder if this has something to do with it.
I love if someone remembers that event better and can provide a link. My memory serves it was about a decade or so ago.
As far as paper copies of laws and proclamations are concerned, the government can print them out in Wingdings for all I care. 99.999% of people will never see the physical paper. What matters are the digital files which, along with PDF, should be available to view in any font I want, whether Times New Roman or Comis Sans or braille.
> "To restore decorum and professionalism to the Department’s written work products and abolish yet another wasteful DEIA program, the Department is returning to Times New Roman as its standard typeface."
So to reiterate, the department decided to move on from the 1992 default Word font to the 2007 Word default (1 year after it was no longer the default).
Nothing is safe from politics when even a font choice has become "woke".
Not exactly related, but this is also the government that keeps insisting that the tariffs are paid by the foreign exporters (now that's a BS justification by any government that warrants widespread panic). It's all about narratives. I wouldn't bother much with fact checking them.
Is it too off-topic or controversial to note that in January 1941 in an edict signed by Martin Bormann,
head of the Nazi Party Chancellery and private secretary to Adolf Hitler,
the Nazis called for a ban on the future use of Judenlettern (Jewish fonts) like Fraktur?
Is it "signalling" when the left's change was for an accessibility reason, to enable more people to be able to easily read? Signaling means there's no tangible benefit to the change, so the Blinken's switch to a sans-serif font would not be signaling.
Rubio, however, specifically pointed out the symbolic (and malicious) gesture of his whole switch back to Times New Roman.
The left didn't react pettily. Please stop thinking the left are the right are the same when the facts show they are not. The left's change was for a demonstrative benefit. The right is doing it so fuck over people. You think these are the same.
Note that, even if that's all true (and I do agree that studies should have been conducted), the two positions are:
a) We made this change because we think it will help certain people
and
b) We made this change because we fundamentally disagree with attempts to help certain people, whether effective or not
I think b) is a lot worse than a). Or, to put it another way, has the current administration demonstrated a benefit from this change, or are they behaving at least as badly as "the left"?
No, you're just falling into the sort of left wing "people who disagree with me can only do so because they are a bad person" trap. You can read the full text of the actual memo (and a reasonable interpretation of it) below, but it appears to me that the principle reason as stated is that Calibri is less professional, inconsistent with all other government communications and even inconsistent letterheads on the very same department's material, and that appearance matters. It isn't in fact about "sticking it to the woke", but it does seem like the original decision to use Calibri was not based on anything and just about appearing to be woke.
> No, you're just falling into the sort of left wing "people who disagree with me can only do so because they are a bad person" trap.
I'm not sure where this conclusion came from. I even acknowledged that the original change was problematic.
> the principle reason as stated is that Calibri is less professional
That's fair, but it doesn't erase the 'DEI' comment in the memo. If that weren't there, we might actually be having a discussion about the merits of one font vs. another.
> It isn't in fact about "sticking it to the woke"
Again, that might be believable if the memo hadn't explicitly complained about DEI.
DEI was mentioned in a footnote, it didn't seem to be the main thrust of the memo. I agree it would have been better to not mention it at all, the decision is perfectly defensible on the basis of all the previous non-footnoted points.
I apologise for my first comment, it seems like those critical of the latest decision are painting a simplistic picture - "this was one side attempting to be kind vs other side deliberately being unkind". But it doesn't appear to be the case to me.
I think the concept of an accessible font is signaling. I don't think that Times New Roman is actually less legible than Calibri, and have never seen research claiming to find that Times New Roman in particular or serifs in general pose accessibility problems.
I’m not sure what you think I mean by “signaling”. This is a study of OCR performance, with no attempt to measure practical accessibility issues caused by the font difference which you and I agree is not big. I’m still very skeptical that even a single State Department employee’s ability to do a good job depends on which font the department uses.
If you say that it doesn’t matter whether changing the font had a large practical impact, because it’s a gesture in the right direction or helps build a culture of accessibility, I would classify that as signaling.
Classify it how you like, but a gesture towards building a culture of accessibility (if indeed that’s what this was) is hardly comparable to an attempt to score points against political opponents.
Regardless of the reasons why, I'm glad. I cannot stand calibri. It's one of the ugliest fonts I've ever had to use, somehow looking uglier than even joke fonts like comic sans
> Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the Biden-era move to the sans serif typeface “wasteful,” casting the return to Times New Roman as part of a push to stamp out diversity efforts.
There are very few ways in which US governance and/or regulation leads the developed world, but a huge (and surprising) one is the 1990 (!) Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). It is astonishingly, transformationally inclusive, and makes life better for every American (because everyone needs accessibility to different degrees, at different times).
Switching from Calibri back to Times New Roman "because DEI" 100% tracks with this administration's spiteful Project 2025 vandalism.
Should've picked Charis SIL. It's a legible and serious serif font, doesn't make you look like you picked the boring Big Tech default and has explicitly Christian origins.
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 enemy
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.
I just wanted to add a comment that I never knew but if you google Times New Roman they display the entire Google web search results page in Times New Roman.
Attention is a limited resource. When people spend it on something, they cannot spend it on something else at the same time. If you want to get away with something unpopular, do lots of unpopular things so the really bad stuff gets mixed in with all the rest. From the outside, it all looks very benign and random.
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 decision is solely because the last guy did something and they can't let anything from the last administration stand.
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. But no: Making a font that is more compatible with screen reader technology is woke. Their words, not mine.
> 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.
"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 of document accessibility requests which he says did not decrease in the Calibri era.
Again, I say this not to nitpick or to dispute that it's kinda silly, but to emphasize that this is a provocation you shouldn't and don't need to rise to. The State Department's font choices do not matter, and it will not hurt anyone nor create a bad permission structure if they use Times New Roman. The only possible way this story could become even a tiny bit consequential is if Democrats take the bait and radicalize against serifs.
Fair point that they didn't say the word woke. I'll own that criticism.
I will assert that any justification for this that could be seen as legitimate is wiped away when they write anything about "Calibri is DEI" when there were valid reasons to consider it.
And believe me, I am well aware of where this ranks in the list of sins of the administration. It's a very small, very petty action in line with their broader ethos.
Roboto Condensed's description reads like something written by wine journalist:
Roboto has a dual nature. It has a mechanical skeleton and the forms are largely geometric. At the same time, the font features friendly and open curves. While some grotesks distort their letterforms to force a rigid rhythm, Roboto doesn’t compromise, allowing letters to be settled into their natural width. This makes for a more natural reading rhythm more commonly found in humanist and serif types.
> calling his predecessor Antony Blinken's decision to adopt Calibri a "wasteful" diversity move
to
> SECRETARY BLINKEN: First, I’m called to make very weighty decisions (inaudible).
> QUESTION: Oh. Type joke.
> SECRETARY BLINKEN: And I’m always trying to be a font of wisdom, (inaudible).
Just... ugh. People voted for all of this non-stop vitriol? I'd like to have a post that added something meaningful but all I have to add is frustration with humanity.
The Supreme Court requires Century (which for any use other than maybe a newspaper is infinitely better than Times New Roman—and for a newspaper, Times is better than TNR.)
yes, so wasteful to select a different font in 2025. Real cost-saving measure switching from the evil woke-font calibri to the strong masculine Times New Roman. Thank God Marco Rubio was on the case to set the universe back into alignment with this big-balled move.
Terry Gilliam at his most deranged couldn't dream up this nonsense.
You know what they always say…never waste a good crisis.
This is our opportunity to tell our friends that neither Times New Roman nor Calibri are very good fonts.
If they’re using Word—and they definitely are—Aptos is a better choice than either.
If they want to look fancy and have a serif in their life, maybe they could try a little Cambria.
But if they have a twinkle in their eye and seem like they want to learn, take a moment to introduce them to the wide and glorious world of Roboto. Tell them about the wonders of medium and light and semi-bold and extra-bold and wide and display and condensed and custom ligatures. Give them a taste of what real office typography could’ve been if Microsoft didn’t absolutely destroy it in the 90’s.
Open their mind. Show them the truth. This is your time.
I guess The White House hasn't received the memo yet about how important serifs is for "presenting a unified, professional voice in all communications". What a joke.
I support the change, though the rationale used for it seems to me to be nonsense.
Times New Roman might not be the world's most beautiful font, but at least is a little bit less atrocious than Calibri (which is awful). So, whatever the rationale invoked, I welcome the change.
Sometimes, when I have to work on documents which will be shared with many users, I use Times New Roman as serif, and Arial as a sans serif. Both choices are (admittedly in my very subjective opinion) better than Calibri, and it's almost guaranteed that every PC will have these fonts available, or at least exact metric equivalents of them.
Good, and not because of the diversity drama that the US government wants to shoehorn in here. Any font that makes the uppercase "i" and the lowercase "L" look the same is absolute garbage. Yes, I have a strong opinion about this!
And now I know why the default font was changed in Word. Arg. Don't think I like Times New Roman but it was the recommend font for academic papers in Brazil (and the recommendation still persists).
I figured the big scandal would be some bloated government contract shelling out millions for Calibri licenses. But nope, turns out the guy just… doesn’t like the font. What an absolute clown show.
Seriously, with all the shit going on in the world, these guys spend time thinking about the wokeness of computer fonts?! What a clown show. Strike-through this administration.
Could anyone please explain how this is "news" worthy? There are literally more pressing issues (inflation, wars, etc), and covering this is asinine, to say the least.
It really is just a bunch of petulant (predominantly, but not exclusively) old fucks throwing tantrums at any form of progress or change whatsoever, huh.
Why the fuck does anybody care? Also is there no way to view these documents in the font of you choice????
The OP successfully included excerpts from the order without changing to times new roman so CLEARLY this is not insurmountable for anybody who actually notices irrelevant details such as this.
HN commentors on this font change harp on about how it's a waste of time (which it of course is), but that font change seemed to receive a more bland reaction. Funny.
Even if you believe the previous administration switching fonts was virtue signaling, then by the same logic you have to also believe this is just virtue signalling.
Just guessing from what is written in the article: Calibri once was chosen by the former administration for accessibility reasons. Maybe the virtue signaling being that Calibri isn't great with respect to accessibility (and IMHO wasn't even designed for it in the first place).
> fonts like Times New Roman have serifs ("wings" and "feet") or decorative, angular features that can introduce accessibility issues for individuals with disabilities who use Optical Character Recognition technology or screen readers. It can also cause visual recognition issues for individuals with learning disabilities.
> On January 4, 2023, in support of the Department's iCount Campaign on disability inclusion (reftels), Secretary Blinken directed the Department to use a more accessible font. Calibri has no wings and feet and is the default font in Microsoft products and was recommended as an accessibility best practice by the Secretary's Office of Diversity and Inclusion in collaboration with the Executive Secretariat and the Bureau of Global Talent Management's Office of Accessibility and Accommodations.
In 2023, the US State Department signalled how virtuous it was, by moving from the previously-default MS Office font to the then-currently-default MS Office font. The current MS Office default font is Aptos, place your bets on what the State Department is going to switch the font to in 3 years time.
As far as I know, font choice has no zero effect on screen readers, which ask compatible software what words are on screen and read them out. There is evidence that serifs cause visual recognition issues for some individuals, but there's also evidence they aid recognition for different individuals.
It probably helped everyone to choose 14pt Calibri over 12pt Times New Roman, as the font is more legible on LCD screens.
The virtue being signalled by the current administration is that everything their predecessors did was wrong and they're literally going to reverse everything out of sheer pettiness. If anything, they should acknowledge the president's long friendship with Epstein and pick Gill Sans as the default. That would be the ultimate "anti-woke" move I think.
Calibri is a Sans Serif font and because it has been the default Microsoft Office font for more than a decade, it is fake email job haver coded (i.e. it appeals to young and middle-aged women who work in HR, this demographic being predominantly Democrat). Times New Roman is a Serif font which looks old and official to cater to boomers and has Roman in it to appeal to Zoomers who want to RETVRN with a V to tradition.
(I didn’t read the article as this is a non-story, but I’m definitely right).
Yep, I've seen what craziness happens when the admin is woke, and I've seen the craziness when it's "anti-woke" and I preferred woke. At least woke didn't kidnap people into unmarked vans for writing a college newspaper article. I don't agree with woke, but they won't send me to Guatemala torture prison bc I don't agree
Professionalism: "Quiet piggy. Are you stupid? You don't have to embarrass our guest by asking a question like that. You're a terrible reporter. Horrible. Insubordinate. You're ugly both inside and out, and a nasty person."
In my opinion, the sole cultural domain in which Republicans are far stronger than Democrats is graphic design.
If you do not have a strong graphic design background, I'd urge you to avoid taking sides on this matter on the basis of party affiliation.
This is good politics from the Republicans.
In my opinion it is disastrous for Democrats to align themselves with mediocre cultural products.
Microsoft has a very close relationship with the US government and over the last 20+ years has demonstrated extremely low quality standards. The US government's shift to using Calibri is clearly a consequence of this close relationship.
Claims about the "readability" of Calibri in comparison to Times New Roman are spurious and unverifiable; very seriously type foundries say things this about every single new typeface released.
Frankly, Calibri is an ugly and poorly designed typeface. It is Microsoft's Vista-era Helvetica dupe. It is inferior to Times New Roman.
If you're defending Calibri over the most popular typeface of all time, I hope it's (somehow) coming from an aesthetically minded place
"Calibri does convey a sense of casualness — and more so, modernity — that is not appropriate for the U.S. State Department. And I do not buy the argument that Calibri is somehow more accessible for those with low vision or reading disabilities. People with actual accessibility needs should be catered to, but they need more than a sans serif typeface, and their needs should not primarily motivate the choice for the default typeface."
Official departmental paperwork shouldn't look clownish.
The same John Gruber that, quote tweeting a news article about Israel closing off phone and internet services to Gazans, wrote "Fuck around and find out"
> And I do not buy the argument that Calibri is somehow more accessible for those with low vision or reading disabilities
Oh well that settles it, John Gruber doesn’t buy the argument. Wrap it up and let’s head home, folks, this one’s settled, no need to refer to any actual research or evidence.
I hadn't planned on spending my evening googling the pay grade of government officials, calculating the time taken to change a font on Microsoft Word and extrapolating that over a year.
If you had read the article, you would know the answer to this question.
Calibri is a font designed to be easier to read on screens, which is where documents are primarily read in 2025. Switching to using Calibri as the default was a meaningful change that provided improved accessibility at literally no cost to anyone.
Switching back to Times New Roman, a serif font that is provably more difficult to read on screens is yet another act of performative cruelty by this administration who seemingly operates with "the cruelty is the point" as one of its core tenets.
You made a low effort post, and I pointed out how if you had put in the effort to read the article prior to commenting you would have gotten the answer to your question.
Would you like me to be more patronizing to you and say, "The article clearly states which of the font changes was the performative one and which was meaningful."?
But sure, buddy, run off to hide behind a site rule the moment you get called out for a low effort post you made that is breaking at least two rules itself:
- Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
- Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
> Is screen readability the only value to consider?
Whether it is "the only value to consider" or not is beside the point, and you know it. The Trump Administration's only value they considered is "Biden did it, so we're going to undo it." They considered nothing else. You know. I know it. Everyone knows it. Why do we know it? Because they have made it abundantly clear that they have no idea what "DEI" actually is, so they just slap that label on anything the previous administration did, put out an order rolling it back, and use it as a wedge issue.
If he was actually worried about whether a san-serif typeface was worse for printed documents, he could have simply ordered that all printed documents must use TNR or any of the other better options that exist. But he isn't. He's simply concerned with killing "DEI," where "DEI" just means whatever they decide it means today.
Because Calibri is an easier to read font on screens, which is where a lot more reading is being done.
Since it was done as an accessibility measure, it is seen as something for "inclusion" which is part of the scary "DEI" (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion). So it had to go, because forbid we do something that makes things slightly easier for people.
Let's even say (incorrectly, probably) that the switch to Calibri was "performative" or "virtue signaling". That's, in my opinion, significantly less terrible than performative cruelty or anti-virtue signaling.
I'll never understand this silly take. they just took a venezuelan oil tanker. is that a joke to you? you might disagree with what they're doing, or argue they are incompetent, but joke is very strange take. they are very serious. ask some undocumented immigrants in the USA about how much they're joking.
in fact - any country seeing what trump is doing both domestically and internationally and not taking their actions potentially against them seriously is stupid imho.
I think by 'joke' people mean "their actions are unreasonable to the point of ridicule, and were they less consequential would be akin to the performance of a circus clown instead of a diligent policy maker."
So it’s a partisan word then and basically devoid of meaning and consistency across political lines. When hasn’t the us political class been a joke by such a definition…? Perhaps when we owned slaves, or interned the Japanese?
I'm laughing at their sheer incompetence. This is coming from a minority who has been targeted by US governments policies and has lost friends because of this.
Yes, the US government is a laughing stock while we have sympathy for those negatively impacted by the decisions made by these incompetent idiots.
Anyone who is laughing is a sucker and an idiot. You keep thinking this administration is incompetent, when in fact they are achieving all their goals. At this point anyone saying they are laughable should be assumed to be part of the propaganda. Ho ho ho, looks at the silly Nazis with their silly swastika.
Blinken was the name of the blind character sidekick in Men in Tights back in the day, so the preference of an actually less appropriate font for reading is on script.
There's a difference between "Let's use Calibri to make our documents more readable" and "Let's go back to TNR becuase using Calibri is woke nonsense by Biden's guy". They could have used pretty much any other reason to switch back to TNR, but decided to make it a childish DEI/"woke" jab.
You can find evidence for both sides, because life is more complicated than that. Do you have 20/20 vision? Hi-def screen? High contrast? Floaters in your eyes? Cataracts? Are you tired? How is the text laid out? Line spacing?
You understand both justifications are actually made up? As there is no evidence Calibri has better readability, certainly it doesn't have anything to do with wokeism.
Our studio, LucasFonts, designed Calibri. Here are our CEO Luc(as) de Groot’s thoughts on the matter:
The decision to abandon Calibri on the grounds of it being a so-called “wasteful diversity font” is both amusing and regrettable. Calibri was specifically designed to enhance readability on modern computer screens and was selected by Microsoft in 2007 to replace Times New Roman as the default font in the Office suite. There were sound reasons for moving away from Times: Calibri performs exceptionally well at small sizes and on standard office monitors, whereas serif fonts like Times New Roman tend to appear more distorted. While serif fonts are well-suited to high-resolution displays, such as those found on modern smartphones, on typical office screens the serifs introduce unnecessary visual noise and can be particularly problematic for users with impaired vision, such as older adults.
Professional typography can be achieved with both serif and sans-serif fonts. However, Times New Roman—a typeface older than the current president—presents unique challenges. Originally crafted in Great Britain for newspaper printing, Times was optimised for paper, with each letterform meticulously cut and tested for specific sizes. In the digital era, larger size drawings were repurposed as models, resulting in a typeface that appears too thin and sharp when printed at high quality.
Serif fonts are often perceived as more traditional, but they are also more demanding to use effectively. While a skilled typographer can, in theory, produce excellent results with Times, using it in its default digital form is not considered professional practice.
Calibri, by contrast, incorporates extensive spacing adjustments and language-specific refinements. The digital version of Times New Roman, developed in the early days of computing, offers only minimal kerning and letter-pair adjustments. This is especially evident in words set in all capitals—such as “CHICAGO”—where the spacing is inconsistent: the letters “HIC” are tightly packed, while “CAG” are spaced too far apart. Microsoft cannot rectify these issues without altering the appearance of existing documents.
I think we all can agree that Comic Sans MS reflects the current US government best, both spiritually and aesthetically.
As an aside, I didn't know what Comic Sans looks like, so I searched on Google and it rendered the whole page in that font. I tried with other Fonts too like Arial and Times New Roman, and it did the same there. So cool!
If you search for Lucas de Groot (the designer of Calibri) you will get the results displayed in Calibri.
Sadly, it doesn't work with the coolest niche fonts... https://www.google.com/search?q=ibm+3270
Very cool... but I can't seem to get it to do so for other fonts I can think of off the top of my head... Inconsolata, Consolas, Fira Code, etc. "Times New Roman" does work as well.
Would be cool to see google support this for at least all the fonts in Google Fonts' library, since they're already well supported web fonts.
This was super cool - nice little Google easter egg.
Your comment may be in jest but there is some evidence that "easier to read" does not benefit "retain what was read."
https://lithub.com/the-ugliness-of-comic-sans-has-a-practica...i tend to find the kerning issues noted by the calibri team are moot. most Times New Roman is perfectly legible with careful observation and maybe a fresh cup of covfefe.
I would say it’s worse than that. Read Plato’s “Republic” and you may come to appreciate a much more expansive appropriateness of Comic Sans, beyond just the current administration.
I have, many times, hence my earlier comment.
If Rubio read Republic then he's just demonstrated that he'd not have understood it.
I would rather see Wingdings.
·puᴉɯ oʇ ǝɯoɔ ʇɐɥʇ sʇuoɟ ɹǝɥʇo ǝɹɐ ǝɹǝɥꓕ
That's the official font of the Australian government.
You meant: Austria. The lang of Kangaroos.
I beg to differ. Wingdings is more like it.
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Maybe when (if?) the Democrats take back the House and Senate in 2026. Right now Congress is solidly right-wing and sees no reason to impeach...nor would a conviction ever happen, even if the trial was held.
> Honestly when are we going to impeach Trump, he's basically the same Hitler.
When did Germany impeach Hitler?
Also, Donald Trump has already been impeached as many times all other Presidents combined.
I bet they want to get rid of Calibri because it was designed by a Dutch person. There's only two things I hate in this world, people who are intolerant of other people's cultures... and the Dutch.
(disclaimer: I am Dutch).
I've always heard this joke with the french instead of the dutch
This is a line from Michael Cain in Austin Powers: Goldmember (2002).
And, he delivers the line with such perfection.
I am yet to see Michael Caine fail at delivering his lines perfectly.
> (disclaimer: I am Dutch).
Well then I suppose it’s only appropriate to say: Goede fhtagn
This reply is far too polite, but I understand protocol and necessity dictates those words.
If you cannot say it then let me: that spiteful, revengeful petty-minded fuckwit needs to be told that it's a fucked decision of the first order, and that someone in his position has no right nor the time to be involved in grinding the minutiae of state so fine.
Heaven help us, please!
> Heaven help us, please!
Midterms are coming. You know what to do.
> Our studio, LucasFonts, designed Calibri.
Damn, the diversity of people one can meet here on HN continues to amaze me. Even after almost 13 years.
> The decision to abandon Calibri on the grounds of it being a so-called “wasteful diversity font” is both amusing and regrettable.
The cruelty (in this case, against people with visual impairments) is the actual point, as always, and the appearance of "going back to the good old times" is the visual that's being sold to the gullibles.
May I ask what your thoughts are on fonts that prioritise legibility over everything else, like Atkinson Hyperlegible? IMHO Calibri has a better balance between legibility and a consistent/polished look. The Munich transportation company MVG wanted to set an example here and adapted this font for their information screens at subway stations, on trains etc. There's one catch though: because Atkinson Hyperlegible tends to have wider glyphs than the previous (also sans serif, of course) font they used, they had to reduce the font size to fit the same amount of information on the screens, so the increased readability is partly counteracted by the decreased font size.
As a lay person who likes to look at fonts closely, the purpose they are intended for matters. I don't like the Atkinson font for body text because I find it too round. For a transit sign I suppose it is fine since it would be printed at display sizes and only momentarily gazed at.
Calibri is a high-quality font that works as body text, but it's cold.
Times NR on paper is fine, on screen it is not fine unless you have a high resolution display.
Politics aside, I never liked Calibri, until last year. I think it has a place for small text printed on paper, but other than that, there are far better fonts out there. The non-sharp/round edges/corners and the fact that it looks a bit childish make me not want to use it in anything serious/professional. It's also waaay over-used by people who don't have a taste in design and just select the default font in their PowerPoint/Word files.
Calibri is a pretty nice screen font. That said, I would rather see official documents in a non-commercially licensed font face that can be used by any/all OSes and platforms without incumbrances.
If they wanted to go back to Times, they could have at least looked at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts
Nah, it's ugly and doesn't exude "professionalism" at all. For that you'd need a serif font, or at least a proper sans serif like Helvetica or SF Pro.
100% this. There are a lot of sans-serifs that are much more prestigious and timeless.
Being the default in MSOffice also doesn’t help with professionalism as it makes it even more pedestrian.
Exactly! idk why I got downvoted...
The current administration is regressive and explicitly, triumphantly anti-expert.
Within this environment the decision to eschew the font that was expertly designed for present needs in favor of one designed in the past for different ones makes perfect sense.
I love how emphasize is given to accessibility for older adults, such as the orange man. But I guess he gets his printouts with few words and big fonts anyways.
The way he writes indicates that he has very little experience with reading in the first place. Weird wording, strange capitalization and punctiation, etc.
Trump doesn't read, according to Pete Davidson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUW3HfPEdKY
...and then he ignores them.
lol he's not reading printouts.
Funny how they make this joke about Trump when biden got caught on camera using cue cards and having reporters questions and headshots on a cheat sheet...
But it's not a joke. We've had a decade of reports with insiders indicating he doesn't read daily briefings. https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-looks-at-charts-in-int...
Can he read? No doubt he can read some. I can't say he's illiterate. But functionally, he's nowhere near the reading and comprehension skills of what we should expect from a national leader.
Can't edit but... an adult who grew up in the US their entire life who can't read out "acetaminophen" or "yosemite" is certainly under-literate.
“Modern computer screens” have changed substantially since 2007. Calibri was not designed for 4k.
That’s why Microsoft no longer sets it as default, and it is expected to be phased out by institutional consumers.
Calibri served its time. But it’s time is over.
Your Calibri font is Microsoft proprietary and is not open source. It exists so that MS Office documents won't look right on non-Microsoft systems. It's a dirty aspect of Microsoft's Embrace-Extend-Extinguish stategy meant to further its monopoly. It's disgusting that you cite all of these wonder benefits of Calibri without admitting the true underlying reason it exists.
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>Serif fonts are often perceived as more traditional, but they are also more demanding to use effectively. While a skilled typographer can, in theory, produce excellent results with Times, using it in its default digital form is not considered professional practice.
This reads like your CEO is mixing an argument against serifs with an argument against Times specifically. Later on they make a case against Times' lack of support for more modern features in digital fonts, which is a fine argument, but a question comes to mind: is the solution a sans-serif font?
It seems to me upon reading the article that Rubio's staff, or Rubio himself, is being overly specific with the font and I suspect that, being uninformed, what they really want is a serif font rather than Times New Roman, specifically. Maybe I'm wrong.
In any case, I'd like for you/your CEO to make it clearer, if you will: do you believe official government communications should use a sans-serif font altogether or is it just a problem with Times? Or both?
On a more personal note, is there any serif font you'd suggest as an alternative?
Thank you. (And sorry if I read this wrong.)
> what they really want
What they really want is to smear something the previous administration did as DEIA, woke, wasteful, and anti-conservative (ie: change).
TNR is awful and anyone who actually cares about serifs knows there are better options.
From the article:
> ...according to an internal department cable seen by Reuters...
The jab at the DEIA is petty, sure. But if the only intent was to smear them, why didn't they even announce it publicly? It was the choice of Reuters and HN to make an MS Office font change(!) a big deal.
> DEIA, woke, wasteful, and anti-conservative (ie: change).
I translate things like "DEI", "woke" and "anti-conservative" as "basic kindness"
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> U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday ordered diplomats to return to using Times New Roman font in official communications, calling his predecessor Antony Blinken's decision to adopt Calibri a "wasteful" diversity move, according to an internal department cable seen by Reuters.
What a waste of government time and spending.
I read the title of this and as I could not wrap my head around the idea of "Rubio" here actually meaning Marco Rubio, I assumed this was a font name, but also laughing to myself just how hilariously absurd it would be for the Secretary of State to involved in picking fonts...only to click the link and discover that yes, it is exactly that absurd.
in this case "Rubio" means that ICE would deport him if they saw him randomly on the streets of Chicago
Did you have that kind of reaction, that it’s absurd, when Blinken ordered the use of Calibri after ~20 years of consistent use of Times New Roman?
It is objectively more concerning and “absurd”, regardless of “team”, that Blinken arbitrarily introduced fragmentation by adding an additional font to official government communications when a convention had been established across government to use Times New Roman.
Can you cite a source that Blinken's decision was arbitrary? Because Rubio himself is quoted here as attributing a reason for the change (i.e. that it wasn't arbitrary).
I'm also interested to hear your thoughts on the arbitrariness of Microsoft's decision to switch to Calibri in 2007 - imagine the "fragmentation" that must have caused across the business world!
You seem weirdly worked up over this.
Blinken made no public statements on this until he was asked about it. He did not come out and say for example, "For too long, the vision impaired community have been discriminated against by the systemic bias via the use of Times New Roman. Today we are taking action to change this and restore the dignity of those this font has long oppressed", but Rubio just did exactly this. For all I can tell the actual decision was a recommendation made by an internal team doing an accessibility review.
The only other place I’m familiar with people making grandiose announcements about their font selection, other than a font company announcement, is here on HN.
Sure, this is a good point, but only if you completely ignore the the accessibility gains provided by the change. But I'm guessing rationality wasn't on the menu when this was written.
No, Times New Roman is old fashioned, so moving to something more readable doesn't shock me.
"wasteful diversity move"
Wild. I'm curious now if someone has an ordered list of fonts from the gayest to the straightest.
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If changing fonts once was a wasteful empty gesture that they used to pat themselves on the back and which didn't benefit anyone, then isn't changing it a second time the exact same thing?
No, you see, it's only wasteful when the OTHER guy does it. /s
People do have tools to make things more readable. Some of those tools are professionally designed fonts and typefaces which are easier for people with low vision to read.
You sound like someone saying we shouldn’t have ramps and elevators because crutches exist.
> if a person is visually impaired, why wouldn't they have tools at their disposal to make things readable?
If it's on a screen in a browser, probably. If it's printed, or on a display not under a reader's control, probably not.
FWIW, I'm partially split. I generally prefer sans-serif overall - have for decades. I think I slightly prefer serif for some printed material visually, but... when I actually have to engage and read it, for long periods, I think I tend to opt for sans-serif. Noticed this on my kindle years ago, and kindle reader now - I usually swap to sans-serif options (I think it's been my default for a while).
If I were to guess, the switch to Calibri in the first place was because people were able to use the MS default in practice instead of having to hand change it, or use "official" templates, which imo is probably more appropriate anyway.
I think Calibri is arguably a better font, to me the bigger issue is the commercial license used in govt works.
> They haven't. And you really think changing to Calibri benefitted anyone?
The wild thing is that even if you don’t respect the switch to Calibri on the grounds that it doesn’t really benefit anyone and is therefore wasted effort for little or no gain, the decision to switch back is a decision to double that wasted effort.
That said, it’s clear from the daring fireball story linked in the thread that this is being super overblown and Rubio isn’t really making an argument that Calibri is wasting money. This is an arbitrary decision.
Calibri is a tool to make things more readable
How much will it cost to change fonts?
To change tens to hundreds of millions of documents, roughly 50-200M USD.
It’s only for the department of state though, and the previous cost to change to Calibri was about $145,000 over two fiscal years.
that was the cost of additional a11y remediation, likely the direct cost of using a different font/typeface going forward was the time it took for people to read the memo and get used to change the formatting (maybe even set a new default, maybe change templates).
https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/full_text_of_marco_rubio_...
of course simply comparing years without a control we have no way of knowing the effect of the change (well, if we were to look at the previous years at least we could see if this 145K difference was somehow significant or not)
Thanks for linking that.
Sadly way more informative than our traditional outlets.
A dollar a doc? Sounds like a sweet job.
The levels of pettiness in this administration know no bounds. I'm sure they'll forbid the use of "woke", and require all government employees to say "I terminated sleep this morning".
> The levels of pettiness in this administration know no bounds
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelt...
What an odd take. Every administration does this sort of petty stuff. nothing new under the sun.
This is demonstrably false. Previous administrations have not. It used to be normal to do things like keeping cabinet members appointed by their opponents or not put up a mocking picture of your predecessor in the white house.
> It used to be normal to do things like keeping cabinet members appointed by their opponents
This particular thing was not all that common between Presidents who succeed normally by election. I think the most recent was Robert Gates serving as SecDef across the Bush II/Obama transition, before that there were five kept across the Reagan/Bush I transition, and no more in the post-WWII period.
(It’s true that the pettiness level in this Administration is unprecedented, but this is not a valid example.)
True, I didn’t mean it was routine but it was somewhat normal. I just wanted to show the incredible range of professional behaviour that has disappeared.
Petty as in 'small and does not really matter' or petty as in 'vindictive'. All administrations do many small things that may not ultimately have much impact, but often those may be for benign reasons. Understanding the reasoning behind the decisions would help in determining what kind of 'petty' this is.
Absolutely vindictive. He goes out of his way to cite "DEI" in his comments.
Both.
It's so utterly juvenile and unprofessional. The kind of thing a petulant twelve year-old does for attention.
Calibri is woke?
I guess I’m glad they’re focusing on this rather than breaking something else in society
Nah, the state department is big enough to do both at the same time - at least it would be at full staffing levels.
Point is they're doing both, at once.
The font is not masculine enough.
All paragraph text to to use the proper manly IMPACT in the future.
The point being that if the change to Calibri has been done to improve accessibility (hence: inclusion) that makes it woke.
Which is stupid, of course, especially considering that sans-serif fonts improve readability on screens for most people, not for a minority.
EDIT: extraneous "don't" in the middle of a sentence
So what next? Wheelchair ramps? Seats for the elderly and the pregnant? Accessibility features don't displace or even inconvenience the majority in any manner. They only make facilities accessible to an additional crowd, who should be getting them as a matter of right in the first place. What's the end game here?
The endgame is to normalize punishing groups/individuals for any reason on a whim of the ones in charge. Start with minorities and people who can’t defend themselves, then later you can do easier to anyone who gets inconvenient. Despotism 101.
They've been talking about rolling back "DEIA" since they got in power. The A is "accessibility" so they're not hiding this.
That does not make it right.
> What's the end game here?
There's no end game in particular.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelt...
Cruelty is the point
Font changes are cruel?
They can be if a font is chosen due to it being easier to read for some people and then it's reverted so that those people will then struggle to read. It's akin to removing ramps from shops to make it awkward for those in wheelchairs.
Many things labeled as woke benefit the masses like environmental protection.
I guess people like to stay asleep.
Will be a rough awakening
> Will be a rough awakening
I used to believe that people would wake up, but that does not seem to be what happens. They are just herded around by the next dog that comes along.
The president of the US struggles to stay awake in his brief detours from the golf course. It’s a perfect metaphor for the country. All seriousness has left the building.
It's just ragebaiting. Don't take the bait.
If I say I bought a yellow car, nobody cares. If I say I bought a yellow car to troll the libtards, now everybody is mad even though what I said makes no sense and it all has little consequence anyway.
I'm way past raging—just laughing at the stupidity at this point.
"anything we don't like is 'diversity' [woke]"
Or maybe the government should have a common convention regarding official government communications, which Blinken added fragmentation to by arbitrarily changing the font away from Times New Roman.
Oh, you're just obsessed with this, aren't you?
Tilting at windmills...
Tilting at wingdings
> What a waste of government time and spending
Was the switch to Calibri in 2023 also a waste of time and money, or are font switches only bad when the Trump administration does them?
If the belief is that switching a font is wasteful, why is the solution is to switch fonts again?
From the article:
> A cable dated December 9 sent to all U.S. diplomatic posts said that typography shapes the professionalism of an official document and Calibri is informal compared to serif typefaces. > "To restore decorum and professionalism to the Department’s written work products and abolish yet another wasteful DEIA program, the Department is returning to Times New Roman as its standard typeface," the cable said.
I don't read that purely as an "anti-woke" move, why did Reuters only highlight that part and not the bit about professionalism? I do indeed agree that serifs look more authoritative.
If it is about professionalism, why mention DEIA at all? It's just virtue-signalling. Reuters realized that and pointed it out.
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> It was Blinken that arbitrarily introduced
The _second paragraph_ of TFA gives a reason for the introduction. Please explain how you came to the conclusion that the change was arbitrary.
The definition of “arbitrary” includes “upon personal whim”, i.e., the State Dept leadership, not coordinated across or with other depts, and “not in a systematic manner”.
I get that people’s biases make accepting reality difficult, but this will all end poorly if you can’t even just be objective on basic things like it being detrimental for one single department of the federal government to arbitrarily change rather significant things like the official font, even worn text, communication is the primary work product and format.
Why did you ignore all the other aspects and simply latch onto something you thought was a loophole because you cannot objectively adapt a relevant definition?
This is not reddit. You should have higher standards for yourself.
> To restore decorum and professionalism
Given the complete absence of either in the current administration, this is clearly not the real reason. So “woke” is the only explanation left.
Authoritative or Authoritarian?
Yes, a true "mask-off moment": I do find that classic LaTeX papers look more trustworthy than whatever MS Word outputs by default.
Associating TNR with authoritarianism would not even be historically accurate, because many authoritarians pushed to simplify writing (Third Reich, Soviets, CCP); if anything, TNR looks _conservative_, which is probably the look that Rubio is going for.
Fasces or fascist?
Because, even if there is a good argument to replace Calibri on grounds of professionalism, the cable still explicitly mentions the "anti-woke" aspect. At best, it's another sideswipe aimed at minorities and people who represent them. At worst, it's 'doing something wrong purely because of prejudice'.
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.
It's becoming increasingly hard to distinguish an Onion article from actual media. Post-truth indeed.
Spending time on something like this suggests he doesn't actually have much to do besides throwing his power around.
People will often use their power to do seemingly meaningless things, when they don't know how to solve the actual problems on their plate.
Marco Rubio famously doesn't have the authority to do what is arguably his job.
> Trump envoy Witkoff reportedly advised Kremlin official on Ukraine peace deal
A more dignified Secretary of State would have resigned when this news surfaced.
> A more dignified Secretary of State would have resigned when this news surfaced.
I remain impressed at the number of longstanding Republican politicians that have been willing to sacrifice their dignity and likely their political career on the Trump altar. It is a one-way trip for their credibility, and when Trump is gone what are they going to do?
The only interesting right wing politician to me right now is MTG. And that's an odd position to find myself in. She is a clown, but suddenly she seems much more real for a moment. Like we might have caught a glimpse of the actual person. I am faintly curious how her political career shapes up over the next few years (assuming her resignation does happen and is not the actual end of her ambitions).
Well, you can come up with this position or view on a 5 minute toilet break after reading something that rallied you up. Once you have a voice you can trigger an avalanche with very little it seems.
Finally, some good news from this administration.
It's on brand for his party.
What do you mean the TIRE company actually reviews restaurants?
with current timeline expect the unexpected
Calibri 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 customization has found that most users don’t use preference settings, but simply make do with the default.
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)"
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/best-font-for-online-readin...
> 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.
> What you actually want to compare [..]
The (ex-)scientist in me is looking for a controlled study, ideally published in a peer reviewed journal, looking at - how can I put this - actual data.
60s of Googling gave me this
The effect of a specialized dyslexia font, OpenDyslexic, on reading rate and accuracy https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5629233/
"A single-subject alternating treatment design was used to investigate the extent to which a specialized dyslexia font, OpenDyslexic, impacted reading rate or accuracy compared to two commonly used fonts when used with elementary students identified as having dyslexia. OpenDyslexic was compared to Arial and Times New Roman in three reading tasks: (a) letter naming, (b) word reading, and (c) nonsense word reading. Data were analyzed through visual analysis and improvement rate difference, a nonparametric measure of nonoverlap for comparing treatments. Results from this alternating treatment experiment show no improvement in reading rate or accuracy for individual students with dyslexia, as well as the group as a whole. While some students commented that the font was “new” or “different”, none of the participants reported preferring to read material presented in that font. These results indicate there may be no benefit for translating print materials to this font."
Advocacy for people with disabilities is important, but actual data may be even more important.
A meaningful testing of the differences between fonts is greatly complicated by the effect of the familiarity with the tested fonts.
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.
> 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.
I'm afraid I assumed this particular part was a joke, but having read it several times I'm no longer sure ...
Assuming it's not a joke, what would you suggest to readers of content using any particular font who don't have "very good monitors"? What are they supposed to do instead? Not attempt to read the content? Save up for a better monitor?
I have written the above posting before reading the complete research paper linked by the previous poster.
After reading the complete paper, I have seen that the study is much worse than I had supposed based on its abstract.
This study is typical for the font legibility studies made by people without knowledge about typography. I find annoying that such studies are very frequent. Whoever wants to make such a study should consult some specialist before doing another useless study.
The authors claim that a positive feature of their study is the great diversity of fonts that they have tested: 16 fonts.
This claim is very false. All their fonts are just very minor variations derived from 4 or 5 basic types and even those basic types have only few relevant differences from Times New Roman and Arial.
All their fonts do not include any valuable innovation in typeface design made after WWII, and most fonts do not include any valuable innovation made after WWI. They include a geometric sans serif, which is a kind of typeface created after WWI, but this kind of typefaces is intended for packaging and advertising, not for bulk text, so its inclusion has little importance for a legibility test.
I would classify all their 16 typefaces as "typefaces that suck badly" from the PoV of legibility and I would never use any of them in my documents.
Obviously, other people may not agree with my opinion, but they should be first exposed to more varied kinds of typefaces, before forming an opinion about what they prefer, and not only to the low-diversity typefaces bundled with Windows.
After WWII, even if the (bad in my opinion) sans-serif typefaces similar to Helvetica/Arial have remained the most widespread, which have too simplified letter shapes, so that many letters are ambiguous, there have appeared also other kinds of sans-serif typefaces, which combine some of the features of older sans-serif typefaces with some of the features of serif typefaces.
In my opinion, such hybrid typefaces (e.g. Palatino Sans, Optima Nova, FF Meta, TheSans, Trajan Sans) are better than both the classic serif typefaces and the classic sans-serif typefaces.
> the study is much worse than I had supposed
The purpose of that research study wasn't to survey the entire history of sans-serif design(!), it was to answer a fairly focused question: does OpenDyslexic improve reading for the population it claims(or claimed) to help?
The answer appears to be no.
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)"
That may be a case of "I hate reading this font so much I don't want to do more than skim over the text."
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I would have thought the change to Calibri was simply because office uses it as the default font now
It was the default, now it's Aptos.
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 virtue signalling and posturing without any real understanding of what they are doing.
The funny thing is that they were indeed funding “trans” mice research:
> To understand the effects of feminizing sex hormone therapy on vaccination, we propose to develop a mouse model of gender-affirming hormone therapy, assess its relevance to human medicine through singe-cell transcriptome studies, and test the immune responses of “cis” vs. “trans” mice to a HIV vaccine.
https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10849830#descriptio...
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More than half. Almost everything they do is virtue signaling.
I listened to the economist podcast on that- hilarious in the worst way- was leading harvard research
All true except the fact that it's not virtue that they're signaling.
Cruelty signalling?
I prefer "ideology signalling" so that it's neutral and we can use it to apply to both sides.
I prefer cruelty signaling, because there is profound difference between the impact of the two on the world. Insisting on naming things so that "bad thing" and "good thing" are undistinguishable is not neutral, it is biased and favors bad actors.
Sure, but that's immaterial to this context, which seeks an apolitical term for "says things they don't believe to curry favour".
It is material exactly here. The preference for "ideology signaling" comes from desire to frame both sides as the same. "Cruelty signaling" is very accurate descriptor. It does not even suggest right wing only thing, if someone on the left signals cruelty, they would engage in cruelty signaling. And if someone on the right performatively helps poor, they are engaging in virtue signaling.
The trouble is, if the things are called as what they are, you cant say "both sides are the same". Because one side is promoting cruelty and the other is not.
> says things they don't believe to curry favour
If you do not believe that trans people should be beating up, but say so to look manly to your boss, you still promoted beating of trans.
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Can you be specific about when this has happened?
1.) Overwhelming majority of political violence is by right wing.
2.) About Kirk specifically, liberals signaled "murder is bad" hard and frequently. Meanwhile Kirk himself signaled hatred.
3.) Meanwhile, Trump, Vance and Hegseth are constantly signaling "murder is good actually, if we are doing it" and "bullying is manly thing to do".
And that is exactly why it is userful to distinguish between "good thing signal" and "bad thing signal".
-----------
Conservatives have the option to signal good things. They make different choice.
> About Kirk specifically
I notice that people are largely staying pretty quiet about the politics of the Kirk murder since shortly after it happened. I assume it is because, to the extent there is evidence of any ideology, groyper fits as well as leftist. Maybe better, even.
"Virtue signaling" still works because the actor indeed believes they are being virtuous.
Since when is it a virtue to needlessly make things harder for some people?
I cannot decide to what extent they see it that way. They certainly have entirely plausible virtuous reasoning for everything they do. Whether that is what they actually believe or not, I have no idea. It is hard to understand the point of view of someone who seems like causing pain is their only priority, and I prefer to think that only describes a small fraction of the people I disagree with politically.
You would need to ask that of someone who agrees with their font choices. I am only opining that they probably have $REASONS that they believe to be virtuous, and that by calling it virtue signaling, we point that out.
In my time as a righteous woke progressive, it eventually dawned on me that the other side was just as likely to believe in the righteousness of their cause, even if I couldn't understand their reasoning for it. It also dawned on me that the righteous folks on the other side of the divide likely see my beliefs and the reasoning by which I arrived at them as equally baffling.
If both sides believe fully in their righteousness, and see their opponents as wholly unreasonable, then we will end up in a non-religious holy war.
The only way to recover is for both sides to turn down their righteousness.
One small step to do that is to at least try to understand--without agreeing--why the people with whom you disagree hold their beliefs, which ones are inflexible and which are mutable.
I just don't understand why it would be a virtue to deliberately make things harder for people. If the font was neutral in terms of being easy to read, then they would never have touched it. To my mind, they're making a "virtue" out of cruelty.
The problem is that we've seen what this kind of "righteousness" leads to (gas chambers, The Final Solution, World War II) and yet we're heading down the same road. There is no reasoning with Nazis.
>I just don't understand why it would be a virtue to deliberately make things harder for [some] people
Yes, obviously, you have stated this before. You are clear on that. I agree with you.
What you don't seem to have done (because you keep saying you don't understand why it would be a virtue) is steelmanned the argument of the other side. Only by doing that can you 1) understand why their plan would be considered virtuous by them, 2) understand what the costs of the calibri font are, and 3) make an informed and rational decision.
Maybe you're right and there is nothing that supports their decision except the parts you see as cruelty, but my suspicion is that you havent investigated that.
Yes, you're right about me not investigating and steel-manning the arguments from the other side.
However, I think it's a mistake to do so as you cannot deal with fascism by discussion, reasoned argument and logic. When a country starts rounding people up and putting them in concentration camps (it's not a prison if people are kept there without due process) then clearly the fascists have taken over. Instead of playing their game of disingenuous arguments (which are mainly used for distraction and to influence the gullible), their behaviour needs to be called out for what it is.
It's like with Musk's Nazi salutes - any attempt to rationalise that as anything else (e.g. "he's autistic", "sending his heart") is a lie and in my opinion, they deliberately do things which are unjustifiable just to see who will show loyalty and follow the party line no matter how ridiculous it is.
>Yes, you're right about me not investigating and steel-manning the arguments from the other side. However, I think it's a mistake to do so as you cannot deal with fascism by discussion, reasoned argument and logic.
A font change is fascism?
It's the sum of their actions that makes them fascist, not just a font change.
Since January 2025.
DEI was cruelty, so it's fitting.
Virtue signaling is for liberals. Conservatives prefer shitty human signaling. Eventually folks will take them for their word I hope.
by that logic if we help them see why don't we help them understand as well?
Nope- times new roman just looks better.
More charitably, the signaling could be: “keep the government as small as possible, but no smaller than that”, i.e. use things that basically mostly work and quit expending resources addressing every edge case, particularly when it’s performative (slight font variations) rather than obvious (a ramp to get into a public building)
That's very charitable--especially considering that leaving the font alone in the first place would have been the smaller option.
And don't get me started about the current meddling of the executive in my private life? I haven't had a more intrusive administration since living in Singapore.
Microsoft Office (and Windows) changed the default font more than a decade ago.
Changing it back is the exact definition of performative work.
Edit: 19 years ago. Almost 2 decades ago!
>Microsoft Office (and Windows) changed the default font more than a decade ago.
You're behind. They've since changed it again. Calibri is no longer the default for Microsoft Office, it's now Aptos. That change was a few years ago.
I just saw when googling Calibri. But even Microsoft didn't switch it back to Times New Roman :-)
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 Calibri are not the only two possible choices.
Maybe the government should make up their own (hopefully public domain) font, which would be suitable for their purposes (and avoiding needing proprietary fonts), and use that instead.
> 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.
Is USWDS still a thing? I thought they were DOGED out of existence.
Good question, with a little searching I found that, in true DOGE fashion, there exists an executive order announcing a new "National Design Studio" which is tasked with updating USWDS
So why fonts are being managed by Rubio and not the Chief Design Officer is anyone's guess
https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/08/fact-sheet-pr...
Yeah it’s fascist looking as hell, and they’re the ones that have been registering all these rando program domains. So, so dumb - if only because it’s redundant and wasteful.
https://ndstudio.gov/
With such inspiring copy as “What's the biggest brand in the world? If you said Trump, you're not wrong. But what's the foundation of that brand? One that's more globally recognized than practically anything else. It's the nation…where he was born. It's the United States of America.” how can you go wrong?
For anyone sharing my confusion: Yes, that cringetastic text (and borderline Hatch-Act violation) is up there, but it's a different linked domain:
https://americabydesign.gov/
The funniest part of this site is talking about how important design is, and then having one bad quality video of a US flag and a bunch of giant text fading into view while scrolling. It's giving "graphic design is my passion"
I'm no expert but "We've been conditioned to accept that mediocre in government is normal." reads terribly.
Surely it should be "...that mediocrity in..." or even "...that mediocre government..." or even "...that being mediocre in...". All of those are better!
edit: this text is a mess. "It's time to upgrade, and fix the nation's digital potholes." That comma is nonsense.
> edit: this text is a mess. "It's time to upgrade, and fix the nation's digital potholes." That comma is nonsense.
I assume they wanted to look smart in the sense "look at us, we used the oxford comma" without actually understanding that the oxford comma needs 3 or more elements listed to be an actual oxford comma.
> AN OFFICIAL WEBSITE OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT
> What's the biggest brand in the world? If you said Trump, you're not wrong.
This is beyond satire by now, it reminds me of Idi Amin and his official title:
His full self-bestowed title ultimately became: "His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, CBE, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular"
Yes thank you for posting the click-through. Just about every site they make is hot garbage unfortunately. It’s depressing.
The Hatch Act is a law, but is effectively dead under this administration as it is never enforced and often violated brazenly.
I think the whole US is being DOGED out of existence tbh.
Ooh, I like Public Sans! I hadn't seen it before.
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.
> not on stuff that from a practical point of view is totally irrelevant.
The modern era we live in has far, far too much of this attitude. It's the same force eroding craftsmanship, attention to detail, and human dignity.
I find it quite reasonable for someone to care about the presentation of official government communications.
And just so we are clear, I also think Rubio is a horrible person.
So, two options.
a) It's a smoke screen. Do something bombastic and provocative so that the opposition chews on that while something else more "important" passes undetected.
b) Nah, he's just stupid.
In general, yes, but for these leaders... the less sabotaging impact they have, the better.
It's not about anything practical, it's all about the message.
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.
The irony here is that Steve Jobs _did_ actually think about fonts. Sure, he certainly didn't think about Times New Roman, but I disagree with the idea that someone at the top should not have time to write a quick memo about trivialities if it bothers them.
(Part of) Steve Jobs' job was to deliver a great operating system, and part of that relates to how fonts are used. No part of the President's job involves picking a font, let alone legislating around it, unless there are actual political factors involved.
The secretary of state communicates with foreign countries, and part of that relates to how fonts are used. I am sure you are already aware of this.
> That's like the CEO of Microsoft having meeting about coding conventions, space vs tabs, variable name format etc.
Gates absolutely did care when Windows products were bad.
Of course, that's his job. You then decided on strategies, not on details.
> That's like the CEO of Microsoft having meeting about coding conventions, space vs tabs, variable name format etc.
No. Those things aren't exposed to the public. But the UI is:
___
Bill Gates:
So I went to Windows update. Windows Update decides I need to download a bunch of controls. (Not) just once but multiple times where I get to see weird dialog boxes.
Doesn’t Windows update know some key to talk to Windows?
Then I did the scan. This took quite some time and I was told it was critical for me to download 17megs of stuff.
This is after I was told we were doing delta patches to things but instead just to get 6 things that are labeled in the SCARIEST possible way I had to download 17meg.
So I did the download. That part was fast. Then it wanted to do an install. This took 6 minutes and the machine was so slow I couldn’t use it for anything else during this time.
What the heck is going on during those 6 minutes? That is crazy. This is after the download was finished.
Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night — why should I reboot at that time?
So I did the reboot because it INSISTED on it. Of course that meant completely getting rid of all my Outlook state.
So I got back up and running and went to Windows Update again. I forgot why I was in Windows Update at all since all I wanted was to get Moviemaker.
So I went back to Microsoft.com and looked at the instructions. I have to click on a folder called WindowsXP. Why should I do that? Windows Update knows I am on Windows XP.
You want to know what the global impression of the US is right now? Here's a translated quote from a newspaper today, from a source in our military:
> – The US has the most qualified intelligence organizations in the world at its disposal. Both the CIA and the FBI have been politicized under the current regime. I find it difficult to see how we will be able to maintain the trusting cooperation we have had with the US in the past after this.
The actions of the current administration speaks far louder than any font ever could, and it's tearing down decades of good will and trust.
> Both the CIA and the FBI have been politicized under the current regime.
The CIA and FBI were politicised well before the current regime. If you live in the US you will be aware of the Russiagate hoax.
The Global impression of the US is down the toilet. This only adds to that. I kept being told that I was not American, and America didn't care what the rest of the world thought. Which is it?
Speaking as someone who is not from the US I can say that the global impression of the US is not helped by the secretary of state bikeshedding about fonts. There are important issues of foreign affairs that need thought and attention at this time.
I don't think it really took much time.
"Use a better font in all documnts from now on"
There you go.
That's not the point at all and I think you know that.
A big part of leadership is conveying priorities. This says "What's important isn't Israel, Venezuela, Russia/Ukraine, China, it's that you used Calibri in compiling a document." It is the very definition of form over substance.
It's an interesting thought, given what current global impressions are.
I'm imagining a scenario in which the President of the United States is doing his usual sort of diplomatic outreach, consisting of waffling incoherently about things he's heard on TV that he doesn't like about their country. At one point he loses his train of thought and starts bragging about how well he's doing in cognitive adequacy tests. The diplomats are waiting until the bit where they get to flatter and bribe him at the end, the bit where he usually reverses his foreign policy, so long as they can get him to understand what they're actually asking from him. One of them speculates whether it's even possible that half the country is actually dumber than this guy.
A staffer wearing a MAGA baseball cap sidles up to them with some briefing notes. And its just impossible not to notice the notes are typeset in the very same venerable font that was once used as the default for Windows 9x.
The diplomats are stunned. No sans serif wokeness here. The typeface exudes heritage and gravitas. At last they realize what a very serious adminstration they're dealing with.
No one cares about the font US documents are written in. You're not that important.
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.
On the Web I see very frequently foreign names, user handles or URLs where I am confused about whether there is an I or an l, because that Web page has chosen to use a bad sans serif font that does not differentiate these letters.
Sometimes there is no problem because the words or links containing ambiguous letters can be copied and pasted. Other times there is an annoying problem because either the stupid designer has disabled copying (or like in the output of Google and some other search engines, copying does not copy the visible text, but a link that cannot be used in a different context, outside the browser), or because I want to write on my computer a link or name that I have received on my phone.
I disabled fonts on the web browser on my computer, in order to avoid that and other problems. I also disabled the display of non-ASCII characters in URLs (which required adding some codes to make it do that; the built-in settings will only work for the domain name and not the rest of the URL), and changed the font used for URLs, which also helps.
Yeah I understand it's an issue other places but I don't think it's actually a significant issue in government documents and forms written in English which is the usecase here. The choice doesn't have to satisfy all requirements it just needs to be a good choice for government writing.
Come to think of it, I vs l vs 1 vs | is one advantage of serif fonts.
Yes and I use the Atkinson font in my emacs (for code) which is proportional and sans serif except for those characters
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atkinson_Hyperlegible
This font can't be promoted enough!
The crossbars on the capital "i" are not serifs.
But sans-serif fonts are certainly the prime offenders of rendering a lower-case L in place of the capital "i".
The crossbar of a t is not a serif, but those of the capital I are definitely serifs.
Only on computer screens it is possible to confuse serifs with crossbars, because of the very low resolution, which forces the increase of the width of a serif to 1 pixel, possibly making it as wide as a crossbar.
To convince yourself that capital I has serifs and not crossbars, just look at high-resolution photos of some Roman imperial inscriptions, like that on Trajan's column, which are the gold standard for the design of the capital letters in serif fonts.
Most letters of the Latin script are made of 3 elements, thick lines, thin lines and serifs. The width ratio between the thick lines and the thin lines is called the contrast of the font.
Serif fonts normally have a higher contrast and sans serif fonts not only have no serifs, but they also have no contrast or only a low contrast.
Serifs are even thinner than the thin lines (which include some of the crossbars), except in sans serif fonts (which have no serifs) and slab serifs fonts (where the serifs are as thick as the thin lines).
Both the sans serif and the slab serif fonts are fonts typical for the 19th century after the Napoleonian wars, when they were used mainly for advertising, where they attracted attention due to their anomalous serifs and they also allowed a lower cost by using cheap paper and printing machines, which would not have rendered well the standard serif fonts.
In several programmer fonts, where most characters are sans serif, a few characters are made slab serif, i.e. with serifs that are as thick as a crossbar, with the purpose of distinguishing them clearly from similar characters. Thus capital I is made with thick serifs looking like crossbars, even if that is not the standard capital I shape. The reason is less to distinguish it from l, which should have a low hook even in sans-serif typefaces, but to distinguish it better from vertical bar, which is important in programming languages.
Moreover, because such programmer fonts are fixed-pitch, a few narrow characters have slab serifs that do not exist in variable-pitch fonts, in order to avoid excessive areas of white space between letters. Such slab serifs added for blackening are put at the top of the small i, j and l letters, not only on capital I (but on the small letters the slab serifs are unilateral, not bilateral, like on capital I). Such extra slab serifs on the narrow characters are inherited from the type-writing machines, where they had the purpose to diminish the pressure of the hammer hitting the paper, to avoid making holes in the paper.
Down-modded by an obscurity apologist.
You are right, but if legibility had been the reason for change, Times New Roman is a rather poor choice, even if better than Calibri.
Among Microsoft typefaces, Georgia would have been much better than Times New Roman, especially when read on displays, but even when printed.
There are of course even better choices, but Georgia is a familiar typeface for most people, it is similar enough to Times New Roman and the older versions of Georgia are free to use by anybody.
Georgia is not as condensed as Times New Roman, but here Times New Roman is the anomaly, as it is more condensed than a normal font, for the purpose of fitting within narrow newspaper columns.
From Windows 3.0 to Windows 98, I have used Times New Roman as my main text font in documents, because Windows did not include anything better, but immediately after the introduction of the superior Georgia I replaced Times New Roman with it for some years, until eventually I stopped relying on the bundled typefaces and I have bought some typefaces that I liked more, for use in all my documents. (Windows 3.0 did not have yet TTF fonts, with which the licensed Times New Roman was introduced later, but it already had a metrically equivalent Times font).
Yep. Any font that neglects to put crossbars on the capital "i" should be eliminated from consideration for any practical application.
I've always found serif fonts easier to read, although I prefer Baskerville over Times.
See this policy of return to Times New Roman really works. People are debating particular letters after (both) rulings have been made instead of the fact that president protects pedophiles.
Only rich ones. Lowbrow pedophiles who hang out in pizza parlors are a whole different thing.
> 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 is a long tradition of fonts being a little ambiguous in that space.
But yes, don't use Calibri in your editor.
> 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.
> Using a sans serif font generally helps anyone with difficulty distinguishing letters so dyslexic, low vision, aging vision etc.
So far as I'm aware, there is very little actual evidence to support this oft-repeated claim. It all seems to lead back to this study of 46 individuals, the Results section of which smells of p-hacking.
https://dyslexiahelp.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/go...
It's not like the State Department would ever mention Kim Jong the Second in documents.
Nope, just Kim Jong one (in French).
> 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.
People named Al are having a field day with the recent AI boom.
El confusion is absolutely a problem for regular people.
This indeed. In the last couple of years, I've had to re-read a whole lot of sentences because I read it as the wrong Al/AI in my head at first.
> Natural language
I said alphanumeric strings not natural language. Things like order codes, authentication codes, license numbers, etc.
That yaa can gat ba wath ana waval dasn't maan that wa all shaald start wratang laka thas.
Alright, Lumpy Space Princess
Legal language isn't very natural
Legal language is natural language with particular domain-specific technical jargon; like other uses of natural language, it targets humans who are quite capable of resolving ambiguity via context and not compilers and interpreters that are utterly incapable of doing so.
Not that official State Department communication is mostly “legal language” as distinct from more general formal use of natural language to start with.
The US Supreme Court uses Century or Century Schoolbook.
No, because normal people can read "l00l" as a number just fine and don't actually care if the underlying encoding is different. AI won't care either. It's just us on-the-spectrum nerds with our archaic deterministic devices and brains trained on them that get wound up about it. Designing a font for normal readers is just fine.
Normal readers know that capital "i" has crossbars on it.
Why design an intentionally ambiguous font? There is only downside to it.
You lost this fight more than a century ago. Helvetica and almost all related grotesque fonts lack a serif on "I", and dominate modern typography. You see them everywhere, on every device. Pull your phone out your pocket and see if you can see "crossbars" on the I. They're not there, and never have been.
And people like it this way! So that's why we design fonts like this.
"And people like it this way!"
Oh really? People have a mechanism for reporting that? And they'll turn away from products using fonts with properly-demarcated capitals?
Ladies and gentlemen, witness the "argumentum ad populum" fallacy.
Yes, exactly this. Judging a document font based on how well it functions as a programming font is weird.
"Only when used in a context where they can be confused."
So what are you supposed to when you're typing along and suddenly you find yourself in such a context? Switch the font of that one occurrence? That document? Your whole publishing effort?
Capital "i"s without crossbars aren't capital "i"s. They're lower-case Ls. Any font that doesn't recognize this should be rejected.
> Capital "i"s without crossbars aren't capital "i"s. They're lower-case Ls. Any font that doesn't recognize this should be rejected.
You have asserted this at least thrice in the past thirty minutes. What makes you feel so strongly about it? "Rejected" for what purpose? Do you understand that you've just trashed Helvetica, to take a famous example?
What an odd question. I don't like degraded communication or stupidity. Is that enough justification?
Oh wait, I trashed hallowed Helvetica? The Lord's font? The font used on the tablets Moses carried down from Mount Sinai? OMG whatever shall I do.
Meanwhile, the question stands.
No. I don’t want the gov wasting money making a fucking font.
There’s a few dozen off the shelf fonts that would work for 99.99% of people.
For those who it doesn’t work, deal with it. It’s a font. Or fallback to system font.
You know the fonts on our roads are standardized? And a lot of other official documents?
Designing a font that will be public domain forever costs next to nothing. It's a one-time cost that pays dividends into the future and that will probably outlive us.
The government would create something standard and accessible, and anyone could use it. No encumbered licensing.
I think companies refreshing design systems is a waste of money, but the government doing it is actually incredibly prudent.
I don't think you understand how gov spends money lol.
What you think is "next to nothing" will 99% turn into $300 million dollars and 10 years later about $4 billion will have been spent.
And 100% there are people waiting to milk the gov doing this. Maybe you are one of them? In that case...
> will 99% turn into $300 million dollars
Only because of corruption, which should be dealt with of course, but that's a totally separate issue that doesn't invalidate the act of making an open font.
Neither Calibri nor Times New Roman are free to use, although they are free in certain contexts for Windows users. The US Government is paying plenty for them.
ha ha MAGA font. Only big letters
THE BEST LETTERS
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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 english is mostly gibberish these days because hardly anyone uses a pen anymore! However, it is mostly "cursive" and cursive is not the same as serif and sans.
English prides itself on not having diacritics, or accents or whatever that thing where you merge a A and E is called, unless they are borrowed: in which case all bets are off; or there is an r in the month and the moon is in Venus.
So you want a font and it needs to look lovely. If your O and 0 are not differentiated then you have failed. 2:Z?, l:L:1? Good.
I use a german style slash across the number seven when I write the number, even though my number one is nothing like a german one, which looks more like a lambda. I also slash a lone capital Zed. I slash a zero: 0 and dot an O when writing code on paper. Basically, when I write with a pen you are in absolutely no doubt what character I have written, unless the DTs kick in 8)
I thought I was the only one that still crossed a seven and slashed a zero. I don’t dot an ‘O’ however.
I cross my sevens, slash my zeros, and use a hook on lowercase T to avoid confusion with plus signs. I think I developed the hook-T habit in college math classes.
I didn’t even think about that one, I do that as well, and for the exact same reason! That’s too funny.
That's good, because the "O" should never be dotted. You use slash OR dot for zero, unless you vaguely remember them both as useful for disambiguating but forgot that both marks are for zero and vary by typeface. Mostly dotted zero was just during the dot matrix era. I wouldn't mind being shown counter examples.
I cross my sevens!
I'll consider starting to slash my zeros. Seems legit.
Øh, that isn't ideal for Danes, Norwegians or people who regularly deal with empty sets.
What I had done sometimes when writing slashed zero by a pencil and needed the disambiguation (which is not that common in my writing but it does happen sometimes that it will be important), is for the slash the other way for zero, to avoid being confused with slashed O or the symbol for empty sets. Atkinson Hyperlegible font (mentioned in another comment) also works that way, too; the slash for zero is the other way than the slashed O in languages that use that.
Fair enough, but I was whittering on about English and not Dansk or Norsk. The empty set should be obvious from context.
In india its considered bad omen to slash 7s.
We are trying to summon a Leviathan here.
> English prides itself on not having diacritics, or accents or whatever that thing where you merge a A and E is called, unless they are borrowed
Its called the letter “ash” and its borrowed from... (Old) English. Though its functionally reverted to being a ligature, which is what is was before it was a letter.
(Also, English has &, which was a letter even more recently—its current name being taken from the way it was recited as part of the alphabet [“and, per se, and”], including the effect of slurring with speed—and which also originated as a ligature.)
The use of the "font" spelling variant rather than "fount" is any case a clearer indication of etymology. After all, a "fount" of types refers not to its role as a fountain of printing (fons fontis L -> fontaine OF -> fountain) but the pouring out, melting and casting of lead (fundo fundere fudu fusum [fused!] L -> fondre / fonte F).
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".
There's no pride in not having diacritics, it's a sign of an insufficient script. It's the reason why English writing gives no hint of pronunciation.
As 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.
To be honest, the first moment I saw the page, it did seem to give my eyes a negative reaction, but after reading a few of the results, it started to look fine pretty quickly.
Nice! Also works with Courier and Comic Sans, but, sadly, not with Helvetica.
And Arial, Calibri, Georgia, and Cambria. It's missing Linux Libertine fonts, though. So typical.
Wingdings would have been nice.
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.
I'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.
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 1930's. Fuck me, it was hard to read those excerpts. But it is what it is. OCR could've converted the font. The problem is, is the OCR accurate? Like, is my search with keywords having a good SnR, or am I missing out on evidence?
Personally, Times New Roman was likely the reason I did not like Mozilla Thunderbird. I have to look into that.
> The default font shouldn't be about aesthetics, it should be first and foremost about usability.
The thing about usability is that it's both objective and subjective, and one can argue that aesthetics is part of usability. For example, I find writing code much more pleasant with Comic Code font, and I can imagine that there are other people that would hate it.
Sure but I think we could agree it looking nice ranks lower than being structurally more difficult to read for people? If there were a freely preinstalled option that was both sure but given the choice between functional and aesthetic readability wins hands down.
Off topic but did you find anything interesting? I spent a few days researching Holodomor and was surprised how poorly understood it still is even today, and badly reported at the time. Good propaganda case study. There’s a dramatic film about the reporting too, Mr. Jones (2019).
I haven't researched it explicitly, but I do come across "what happens in the wider world" notices in small historical newspapers and sometimes I search to see what it was about. Saw a mention about some general winning an important victory, searched his name, found out he was one of the whites, and the first thing claimed about him was that he only came in "once the war was already lost".
What I found was that yes, it was reported about, but very little. The notable person who did research the event, Gareth Jones, is indeed an interesting story (he was also referenced to by the newspapers). I believe it was underreported, but we could've known. Helped, now that is a different question I don't dare to answer. The Soviets used disgusting tactics in Eastern Europe, see the book Bloodlands.
> 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?
Printed document isn't what I was on about. There the default should 100% be about accessibility (and then we just want that by default cause we're used to it).
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.
I think it would be a smaller issue if it only applied to digital media. Presumably though this applies to all media.
And I can certainly confirm that changing the font of PDF will almost always result in a unreadable mess. Something about how a PDF doesn't have text "blocks" and instead fixes each character making text reflow almost impossible.
There's no irony in that: different medium.
The Dutch dev of Calibri commented on the history [1].
He makes a couple of good points, nuances. The main one I liked is related to your premise: it was that the Times New Roman font was optimized for printing newspapers whereas his successor was meant for computer screens.
Ultimately, IMO this is just bullying people with bad eyesight and dyslexia (and said bullying I can only regard as hatred towards minorities which reminds me of a different era). My father had MS and due to that bad eyesight. He had special glasses with a special lens to read. Of course any font change has a learning curve, but to me this just hits home as I've seen him struggle to read.
[1] https://nos.nl/l/2594021
> He had special glasses with a special lens to read.
Bifocals, I'm guessing.
Many people with MS get diplopia, and so need prismatic lenses to help with the double vision.
He passed away ten years ago, the glasses were custom-made in 70's or so. He'd close one eye and use the other (better suited for this). He'd have tremors, including in the eyes. Reading made him very tired, eventually a friend would read complex beta literature before him. To me (as kid) the glasses felt like a huge looking glass.
A friend of my parents also made a custom card deck, with huge symbols and letters. That way, we could work around his disability. We always had to work around his disability, and it regressed but slow variant and he was also too old to get the medicine which effectively stopped the MS from getting worse. However, it meant other people who had the quick version or were younger got more QoL.
I don't think he ever used Calibri. I mean, at that time, he wasn't into computers anymore. He had all kind of health isssues due to MS. It pains me to think people like him now have more difficulty to read letters because of BS decisions like these just cause NIH or whatever the silly reason must be. But there's also good news: if it is digital, they can override the font and such.
Sounds like he had lots of good people around him helping him.
The technical aspects you mention are important. I have diplopia, and also close one eye. It gets worse in the evenings. I love paper books and own many, but all my reading now is on a Kindle, with a huge font. It makes it so much easier.
Have you tried eye-patching as a therapy to train the non-dominant eye?
As others have said, Times New Roman was specifically designed for newspapers:
* condensed glyph widths, for ease of setting in narrow columns
* high x-heights and short ascenders and descenders, so lines can be set tighter and more text thus fitted on the page
* robust forms and serifs to allow for the tendency of newsprint to absorb and spread ink
These features don't necessarily translate to improved readability in other contexts.
Times New Roman was designed for a time when printing quality was not that good. With 1080p screen nowadays, that barrier is removed, so optimization of readability has different constraints.
I found that Calibri looks better than TNR on a low dpi screen. The serifs just make the letters look jagged.
> 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?
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I'd say changing something for vague aesthetic reasons is far more wasteful than doing so to make things more accessible. Compare the cost of installing a curb cut vs. filling it back in because you think a straight curb looks "stronger."
serif vs sans serif is not "a vague aesthetic reason", it's the most fundamental typeface choice you can make, moreso than monospace (which is an artifact of some 19th century technology) Rubio is an attorney, and there are many stylistic conventions in the legal and judicial space, why ruffle those feathers by flouting them? if you are given a style guide for your PhD thesis, do you follow it or do you futz endlessly with the fonts to show them what an independent thinker you are?
It seems like Rubio has chosen to futz endlessly with fonts rather than follow the established style guide.
People should be deeply concerned that Rubio even has time to think about this. How does he not have something better to do?
Whether or not serifs actually make text harder to read, at least there is some plausible justification for the original change. Maybe it was stupid at the time, but it's done.
The justification here is petty and wasteful on its face.
No one said it can't be changed back. No one called anyone weird or Hitler. They just said that "it was wasteful to change it from X to Y, so I'm changing it from Y back to X" isn't a logical argument.
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.
That wasn't the point; the point was about the hypocrisy of calling it "wasteful".
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 a new font for the purpose.
(I personally much prefer Times New Roman to Calibri for printed documents, but that’s neither here nor there.)
US Gov already has an ”official” open source typeface, Public Sans. https://public-sans.digital.gov/
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)
This is my view as well. That being said, Time New Roman is marginally better because there are several good, modern open source alternatives with the same metrics that can be substituted. And there's good tool support virtually everywhere for those alternatives, like in TeX.
There is a metric-compatible open alternative to Calibri (Carlito) but it seems more vulnerable to lawyer shenanigans and doesn't have extensive tool support.
Which Times New Roman alternatives would you recommend?
MS makes "Times New Roman" available (at no cost), but not "Calibri".
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.
Subtle and clever. You got a laugh out of me.
I chuckle at the thought mr. Putin was unable to parse some important US document, complained, and mr. Trump's minion promptly fixed the issue!
There's a new serif in town.
Underrated comment.
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.
which murders? are we talking about ICE or Venezuela or something else?
Does it matter? There are multiple instances of this admin murdering people.
Gotta get that typeface looking good before the regime change starts.
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.
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.
I think the comment points to the other possible motivation - undo everything that was done under the Biden admin out of principle/spite.
And tell everyone that it's to get rid of DEI or something, because thats how much you respect your voters' intelligence.
So did sans serif fonts
They should bring back mid-Atlantic accents, then there'd be some silver lining to all this bullshit
Yeah, we all thought the fascists at least would be stylish when they came.
No, it’s all just fake gold and baseball caps.
I 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.
Paganis are beautifully designed cars, but the labelling of buttons and toggles inside the center console look cheap (IMO) because their font seems straight out of a quickly made flyer designed by bored teacher who just discovered Word Art.
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 variable than most biological quantities, so in the end general rules are the best one can really do.
Here of course, it's nothing more than rearranging the deck chairs, while the captain targets the next iceberg "to teach the ice a lesson!"
I want to read a study that compares what readers estimate for much effort was put into producing the same page of text in two contemporary and basic serif and sans-serif fonts. My hypothesis is that the serif font is viewed as more polished or refined, and therefore the result of more hours of work. But I could be wrong.
This is in-line with the advice here to use serif for long form and sans for short. When you're making signs and things like that, you don't have the repeated forms to inform your ability to interpret letters, so the serifs act to confuse readers, while in long form, they add flair, which could be more artistic and tasteful.
> 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 )
Pagani interiors look so plastic and tacky. Why do they make the interior of such beautiful, expensive cars look so cheap?
I love how people are passionate about fonts. Search for the 2017 Saturday Night Live skit with Ryan Gosling "Papyrus". It captures the obsession!
"It’s like they spent $300 million on the movie, and then.. They just used Papyrus."
Sadly, in this particular case, it's not the font that they are obsessed about.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVhlJNJopOQ from 2017
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8PdffUfoF0 from 2024
“Sometimes I get emotional over fonts.”
- Kanye West
My friends and I still reference "Shakira merch" from that sketch
yes! the first one^1 is hilarious! the sequel^2 is somehow equally funny.
1. https://youtu.be/jVhlJNJopOQ?si=jq6NsPhnzwCKXFPr
2. https://youtu.be/Q8PdffUfoF0?si=sx8XC0X6oJqJIXmc
Reuters calling the switch a "font" change instead of a typeface change is troubling, though consistent with a society that now casually refers to all pasta as "spaghetti". A typeface is the design; a font is its specific instance. This is basic knowledge, taught to children, houseplants, and most domesticated goats.
A simple correction would stop this spiral, but Reuters appears committed to forging a bold new era in which terminology is chosen at random, like drawing Scrabble tiles from a bag and declaring them journalism.
I’m a professional graphic designer, people in the industry use font, type and typeface interchangeably. No one goes “Umm Actually…” you should also tell that to who wrote css, because font-weight doesn’t make sense if a font is already a specific weight. Words mean something specific until they don’t and the meaning changes over time and that’s okay
> A typeface is the design; a font is its specific instance. This is basic knowledge, taught to children, houseplants, and most domesticated goats.
I didn't know this, and this explanation isn't really helping. (I did know there's a difference between typeface and font, but no idea what).
Why would this be basic knowledge when all most people ever have to deal with is the font options in Word?
Originally, a font (also spelled fount, at least formerly) was a physical thing: a collection of metal slugs, each bearing the reversed shape of a letter or other symbol (a glyph, in typographical parlance). You would arrange these slugs in a wooden frame, apply a layer of ink to them, and press them against a sheet of paper.
The typeface dictated the shapes of those glyphs. So you could own a font of Caslon's English Roman typeface, for example. If you wanted to print text in different sizes, you would need multiple fonts. If you wanted to print in italic as well as roman (upright), you would need another font for that, too.
As there was a finite number of slugs available, what text you could print on a single sheet was also constrained to an extent by your font(s). Modern Welsh, for example, has no letter "k": yet mediaeval Welsh used it liberally. The change came when the Bible was first printed in Welsh: the only fonts available were made for English, and didn't have enough k's. So the publisher made the decision to use c for k, and an orthographical rule was born.
Digital typography, of course, has none of those constraints: digital text can be made larger or smaller, or heavier or lighter, or slanted or not, by directly manipulating the glyph shapes; and you're not going to run out of a particular letter.
So that raises the question: what is a font in digital terms?
There appear to be two schools of thought:
1. A font is a typeface at a particular size and in a particular weight etc. So Times New Roman is a typeface, but 12pt bold italic Times New Roman is a font. This attempts to draw parallels with the physical constraints of a moveable-type font.
2. A font is, as it always was, the instantiation of a typeface. In digital terms, this means a font file: a .ttf or .otf or whatever. This may seem like a meaningless distinction, but consider: you can get different qualities of font files for the same typeface. A professional, paid-for font will (or should, at least) offer better kerning and spacing rules, better glyph coverage, etc. And if you want your text italic or bold, or particularly small or particularly large (display text), your software can almost certainly just digitally transform the shapes in your free/cheap, all-purpose font, But you will get better results with a font that has been specifically designed to be small or italic or whatever: text used for small captions, for example, is more legible with a larger x-height and less variation in stroke width than that used for body text. Adobe offers 65 separate fonts for its Minion typeface, in different combinations of italic/roman, weight (regular/medium/semibold/bold), width (regular/condensed) and size (caption/body/subhead/display).
Personally, I prefer the second definition.
In my experience, "font" is the colloquial term referring to either. Programmers get to demand precision, for journalists it's a bit tougher. The de facto meaning of terms does, unfortunately, evolve in sometimes arbitrary ways. And it's tough to fight.
If all DoS documents are prepared with the same software or software suite (e.g. MS Office), isn't that a distinction without much of a difference? They've gone back to using TNR.ttf instead of Calibri.ttf (or whatever the files are actually called).
> This is basic knowledge, taught to children, houseplants, and most domesticated goats.
https://xkcd.com/2501/
> Reuters calling the switch a "font" change instead of a typeface change is troubling
Come on, they're writing for a general audience, not a bunch of pedantic typographers and developers.
> a society that now casually refers to all pasta as "spaghetti"
I have never experienced this; in what contexts have you?
> taught to children
We were 100%, never taught this (in the UK).
> A simple correction would stop this spiral
It wouldn't, it would just mean fewer people understood what the story was about.
Which Times does Rubio want: There's a NY version, and a Chicago version.
I got politely informed to not use NYTimes font in a paper I turned-in when I was in college. On that occasion, it was an accident. I'd taken the file to school to print, and my owiginal font selection had been replaced by the default. My professor merely said that it is hard to read by people with older eyes.
Several years later, I understand. My default font is now set for Liberation Sans. I have trouble reading 'decorative' fonts. For printouts, I use Liberation Mono.
Are you saying there are multiple fonts named "Times New Roman"? I can't seem to find any reference to this online.
Is Calibri actually more accessible? Every step of this story seems pointless and fake.
If I remember correctly Microsoft did a bunch of studies back in the day and found the Calibri had some of the best readability across a range of visibility and reading impairments (like dyslexia).
Serif fonts have some readability features of their own, specifically for printed word.
You are correct. Microsoft invested significantly to create a modern properly designed font that is easy to read on a variety of screens, prints clearly and consistently, scales well, and can do italics, bold, etc well.
I think this came out back with Office 2007 or something. I believe Aptos is actually the new next generation font that should generally be considered an enhancement to Calibri.
While Microsoft isnt great at many things, their investment in font design and support is outstanding.
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.
Link on that, as OCR should be more reliable with Times New Roman due to significant serifs.
I don't have link on that, but the main difficulty with OCR isn't the OCR part (not anymore at least), it's the "clean up" part, and serifs are a pain in the ass, especially on sightly crumpled paper. My use case was an ERP plugin that digitalized and read to receipt to autofill reimbursement demands, and since most receipt use sans-serif fonts, it was mostly fine, but some jokers use serifed font (mostly on receipts you get when using cash, not credit card receipts) and the error rate jumped from like 1% to 13% (not sure about the 1%, it might be a story i told myself to make me feel better, it was a decade ago, before i pivoted to network from AI. I always take the best decision it seems)
I don't know what studies Blinken's State Department considered, but here are 2 studies on the matter.
https://www.academia.edu/72263493/Effect_of_Typeface_Design_...: "For Latin, it was observed that individual letters with serif cause misclassification on (b,h), (u,n), (o,n), (o,u)."
https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10220037: [Figure 5 shows higher accuracy for the two sans-serif fonts, Arial and DejaVu compared to Times New Roman, across all OCR engines]
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.
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.
printed documents, images, horribly inaccessible pdfs, horribly inaccessible websites
> Printed documents - Use the original, which is digital.
> Images - Use the original, which is digital.
> horribly inaccessible pdfs - Use the original, which has real text in the PDF
> horribly inaccessible websites - All text on any web site is digital. Nobody uses OCR on a website.
A massive paper producer like the government shouldn't adopt their type setting to people who are using technology wrongly.
an example from today (pdf warning): https://www.ntsb.gov/news/Documents/National%20Defense%20Aut...
God damn...
Why didn't they fax it back and forth a few times as well, just for good measure?
it's easier to mandate font than to excise all processes within the fed bureaucracy that result in these.
images being digital have no bearing on OCR ability
Images: use the original, which is a digital text document and not an image.
Unless they are making documents on typewriters. And in those cases neither Biden or Trump font is an option.
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
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.
> the slightly higher density of the Times version (compare row by row)
I don't think that's the comparison you want to draw? The rows appear to hold very similar amounts of text.
But the rows on the left, in Times New Roman, are shorter than the rows on the right. So even though "one row" holds the same amount of text, one column-inch of Times New Roman holds more rows.
The Times New Roman looks more readable to me because it has thicker strokes. This isn't really an issue in a digital font; you can't accidentally apply a thin layer of black to a pixel and let the color underneath show through.
Anecdotal but the new default Office font Aptos seems much better than both TNR and Calibri.
This feels more like Microsoft lock-in than anything else. But I don't know how that conspiracy would actually work.
What is involved in changing the font for a government agency?
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
(We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46224867. It's fine and interesting, but the offtopicness of you-know-who is a bit too agitating at the top of the thread.)
If you read the article, Calibri usage was instituted during the Biden administration. So, there's probably a diversity of government styles that get involved with typefaces.
Calibri is designed for screen use and Times New Roman for printing. As usually, there is a practical option and conservative option.
But stakes are quite low here. Some bureaucrats will have nearly undetectably harder time to read Trump speaches
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...
I rather assumed so as well, but a big of digging turns up a whole history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiqua%E2%80%93Fraktur_disput...
Surprisingly to me the Fraktur typeface was the traditional "German" typeface but was disliked by Hitler.
Yeah it was so the occupied peoples could read the edicts better. Sp perhaps not so neutral, after all.
“I want a new font so it’s easier to read” isn’t neutral?
Not when you are the aggressor in WW2?
I guess if Russia invaded Western Europe and Putin decided to switch from Cyrillic to Latin script so the subjugated peoples would more easily read and learn Russian, that would be neutral too?
That isn’t a genuine argument.
Font face != different language + different alphabet.
Font, still a bad argument but technically correct. Font face, nah.
Fraktur actually does use a partially different alphabet. For example it uses the Long s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s and Half-r: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_rotunda
About the "bad argument", I can't argue with you, because I'm not the one arguing. You'll have to take it up with the author of these lines:
"In a hundred years, our language will be the European language. The nations of the east, the north and the west will, to communicate with us, learn our language. The prerequisite for this: The script called Gothic is replaced by the script we have called Latin so far"
(Besides, what's so strange about transposing Cyrillic to Latin? It happens all the time even today when people don't want to or can't switch keyboard layouts.)
I tend to agree with you, many people are passionate about typefaces, and dictators are no exception. [Passion about typeface] seems to be a low-signal detector for dictators. I'm passionate about lasagna, and I'll bet Mussolini was too -- but that probably doesn't mean I'm a fascist.
But if you go around and tell everyone you meet that they're doing it wrong and that lasagna MUST be prepared exactly the way you do it, because it's the one and only right way, then you're a lasagna-nazi :)
As they say, "Hitler drank water."
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.
I'm not sure why you mention consistency. The cable explicitly says it's a) for the decorum and b) anti dei. That's literally the same reason for the music restrictions - that's why I'm bringing it up.
> He just didn't like the font so he ordered it to be changed.
There is your answer. He imposed his will - that's what dictators do. You have to be careful when the reason for any costly change is one individual's personal preferences. It's a bad omen.
> Equivalent to your boss ordering tabs be used instead of spaces.
That's not always equivalent, especially if it is to set a standard. Obviously, some people using spaces and the others using tabs is not ideal in situations you're referring to. It's also fine to change the standard, if they find a significant problem with the current convention. But if your boss wants it changed, and their only explanation is their dislike of the status-quo, then that's a red flag. The problem isn't very serious right now, but could grow into one in the future and you have to be on the watch.
Fascism relies on politicisation of aesthetic
See V is for Vendetta, I would argue there is a sort of seduction in the Baudrillard sense involved.
[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.
Serif fonts are easier to read, so now I guess you have to invert your mind as to who is a fascist and who is a liberator?
Ooh ya got me.
Not. The problem is not even about which font is actually more accessible. It's the self proclaimed reasoning. Rubio, by his own words, states that the change is about aesthetics and anti DEIA politics.
However, if you want to argue about actual accessibility, which is not what is happening in the Dept. of State, the US government's own accessibility guidelines contradict the idea that Serif fonts are more accessible; https://www.section508.gov/develop/fonts-typography/
Do you happen to know anyone with a reading disability at all? A dear friend of mine has dyslexia, and I've seen first hand how important this stuff is for his comprehension.
Should text be made less accessible to read for everybody else, in order to accommodate people with dyslexia? Because everybody who reads a lot prefers serif fonts, since they are easier to read. That's why books are printed in serifs.
Since it's all digital, this all shouldn't be a problem in 2025.
Nope. That choice wasn't for aesthetic reasons.
How is that downvoted? You can’t seriously disagree?
[flagged]
While mostly framed as a matter of clarity and formality in presentation, Mr. Rubio’s directive to all diplomatic posts around the world blamed “radical” diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs for what he said was a misguided and ineffective switch from the serif typeface Times New Roman to sans serif Calibri in official department paperwork.
In an “Action Request” memo obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Rubio said that switching back to the use of Times New Roman would “restore decorum and professionalism to the department’s written work.” Calibri is “informal” when compared to serif typefaces like Times New Roman, the order said, and “clashes” with the department’s official letterhead.
As far back as I can recall, this is a politician who has railed against 'political correctness'.
Like the choice of typeface is of literally no importance whatsoever but it is also the funniest thing in the world that there is now a DEI font.
The thing is that some section of the right has convinced itself that Calibre is some DEI font. Meanwhile the rest of the world is just living life and having to deal with people getting this worked up about the default font of Microsoft Office since what, 2008?
Parallel universes
It's incredibly generous to so many future plaintiffs to have this overt hostility to the very concept of accessibility and fairness and put in writing, so many times and in so many ways.
Here's the actual memo, in case you want to read it yourself and form your own conclusions:
https://daringfireball.net/misc/2025/12/state-department-ret...
Butterick on TNR:
(https://practicaltypography.com/times-new-roman-alternatives...)
> When Times New Roman appears in a book, document, or advertisement, it connotes apathy. It says, “I submitted to the font of least resistance.” Times New Roman is not a font choice so much as the absence of a font choice, like the blackness of deep space is not a color. To look at Times New Roman is to gaze into the void.
> If you have a choice about using Times New Roman, please stop. Use something else.
And on Calibri:
(https://practicaltypography.com/calibri-alternatives.html)
> Like Cambria, Calibri works well on screen. But in print, its rounded corners make body text look soft. If you need a clean sans serif font, you have better options.
- - -
To telegraph an identity, TNR is a good choice for this administration; so, credit where due, well played. Still, I would have gone with Comic Sans.
For about ten years I worked for composition shops, and eventually for a maker of typesetting systems. Through blurred eyes I could tell TNR from Baskerville from Garamond from Janson from ... Some of these fonts I can still identify.
But I have no idea what font was used in the book I just finished reading or the book that I'm returning to later today. My main question about a font is whether I can read it with old eyes.
I do agree that designers should care about these matters. I'll add that for some portion of the reading public TNR more likely means The New Republic than Times New Roman.
[Five minutes later: the book just finished, What We Can Know by Ian McEwan, appears to be set in Palatino, never a favorite of mine. The one I'm returning to, I'm not sure.]
My old eyes really wish more people used something like New Century Schoolbook.
They still do. It's the required font for all US Supreme Court legal work.
People like this makes me want to use Times New Roman more. Maybe not Butterick specifically (the website is fine), but all those people that make a blog and pick a font before even knowing what they even want to write. Most of the time people change the default my web browser has, they make things worse. For a font choice to be any kind of personal expression in my eyes, you first need everything else in place: content, layout, design.
To spite these people I force the use of Arial on the worst offenders. The list is now a couple of thousand websites long.
But you're not spiting anyone, they don't even know about this, just wasting your time compiling a list of a thousand websites
Oh, I could have picked a other font. I just get a smug feeling when forcing these websites to use Arial. The main reason for using another font on these web pages is that their own choices are worse than not changing it. So that list of thousands of web pages is to make their web pages legible and more usable, not just to be a prick.
I picked Arial so that I could tell the web pages apart from those who had the good taste to leave my web browsers standard font alone. I don't mind arial.
Perhaps your smug feeling can cancel out the smug feeling the author/publisher had when picking a font before even knowing what they even want to write.
It's important to keep the smugness balanced, thanks for doing your part.
> Most of the time people change the default my web browser has, they make things worse.
In Firefox: Settings → Fonts → Advanced… → untick Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above. I’ve been running this way for almost six years now; it makes the web so much better.
When there's an HN link to some philosophy website that intentionally only uses lower-case letters, an obscure font, and yellow on green color scheme, with a page explaining those choices
You can’t separate layout and design from typeface selection.
But yes I agree content must come first. Typeface probably comes second!
>Still, I would have gone with Comic Sans.
I don't often genuinely laugh out loud at comments on HN, but that one was good! Subtle, classy, and a gentle yet effective dig.
Honestly, I like Comic Sans.
It’s clear, legible and whimsical.
In the context of documents, the lack of font choice regarding Times New Roman could be partly attributed to the fact that it was the default font on Microsoft Word until 2007. The irony is, of course, that it was replaced by none other than Calibri.
I definitely was thinking of Comic Sans. Both in terms of the horrible typeface and the “not funny” connotation of the name. (Yeah I know sans is referring to lack of serif)
> I would have gone with Comic Sans
Funny, I would have gone with Tannenberg
The Times New Roman commentary could have been true back when it was written, but now Calibri is the default for Microsoft Word, and has been for a long while (almost 20 years). So choosing Calibri is the path of least resistance.
Aptos has been the default font for Microsoft Word since 2023.
With all the fanfare made over Calibri back when it was announced, TIL about Aptos
I enjoyed the argument that this is going to open up a new time point for digital forensics. Many people have doctored documents pretending to have made them in the past. Except they did not realize that the vintage software used font X, but the modern default is now Y. There have been a few court cases where essentially someone is able to say, “This font is clearly Calibri which did not exist at the time this document was supposedly printed.”
If you are a Deep Space 9 fan, this is where you get to scream, “It’s a fake!!!”
Example: https://valawyersweekly.com/2023/04/03/font-choice-exposes-f...
The more famous example being the Pakistani Prime Minister forging documents in Calibri dated before its release.
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-40571708
Aptos is slightly wider and taller but looks very very similar to calibri, especially calibri a point larger.
So now Times New Roman not only looks uninspired and bland, but also dated? Yeah, I would say that's a good fit...
Good thing the world is entirely stable and the United States have literally no more pressing issues.
Serifs should improve stability.
Was the world stable in 2023 when the font change occured?
Never before has a font change been so politically divisive.
I’ll personally be taking my votes to supporters of Helvetica next election.
Helvetica is great for signage, but in my opinion it isn't great for longer texts.
Wasn't it originally intended for signage, advertising, titles, other display text, etc., rather than for body text?
Maybe not, but the BBC's use (and subsequent dropping) of Gill Sans comes close!
I like serif fonts, but never liked Times New Roman too much. Printed, in high resolution, it is kind of ok, but I absolutely abhor it on displays. Which is where we read things 99% of the time nowadays.
Georgia, Palantino, Bookerly. Those are high quality serif fonts which suits every occasion.
Hilarious. It could be a Mike Judge script.
"Do I look like I know what a jay-peg is?"
This is why I'm seriously considering learning Chinese. Next 50 years won't be US lead.
When senior government officials are spending time & public mindshare/attention on whether a particular font is or is not diverse then you know it is game over.
The details don't matter...this being a topic at all is the news
Read up on the state of the Chinese economy, it’s not a given they’ll be in the drivers seat long term either.
I know they're leveraged to the hilt, their demographics are shaky AF etc.
...but end of the day productive capacity is what matters. I don't see anyone close on that mix of pace, tech, low cost, ability to execute and scale.
A strong argument could be made on any of those metrics that someone could beat them fair and square, but the whole blend...there is nobody even competing in same league and that lead looks like it'll last rest of my lifetime
> their demographics are shaky AF
Every major country's demographics are shaky. Japan and S.Korea are already shrinking. The US is propped up by, uh, low-quality immigration, and fertility has nevertheless dropped to record lows. The large countries of Europe are either basket-cases, tinderboxes, or both. Germany and Italy haven't had above-replacement TFR since 1970!
China's not doing great, but having a population reservoir of 1.4B can make up for a lot of deficiencies. If everybody shrinks or becomes utterly dysfunctional, I'd bet that a vast, productive, essentially monoethnic nation weathers the storm better than the rest.
pushing for more literacy at scale is usually a good thing.
this approach is garbage, but i find your second line a bit odd.
it is also funny you bring up china because china changed their entire character system for diversity reasons (less educated people couldn't read).
You certainly won't have to worry about them changing fonts as easily...
"[Rubio] ...calling his predecessor Antony Blinken's decision to adopt Calibri a "wasteful" diversity move..."
Bro what. It was the default font in Microsoft for many years thus, it was the default font for most office software for many years -- just like Times New Roman was before.
What.
The article says it's better than Times New Roman because it's easier to read for those with disabilities - so of course the government needs to make things worse for them. Wonder if someone could sue over these kinds of changes that are being deliberately made to be less accessible.
Is that even true? The article is really vague on the type of disability and basically just claims that serifs are harder to read.
Generally sans-serif is advisable for small sizes, although I assume the main things are large open counters, tall x-height and low stroke contrast.
I’ve often read that dyslexics favor strongly distinctive characters and “grounded”, bottom-heavy letterforms. I feel like serifs actually sound pretty good there.
It’s also important to consider whether such studies were conducted before or after high-PPI displays became prevalent and leveled the playing field for serifs.
The wiki explicitly mension the typical sans disadvantage: "One potential source of confusion in Calibri is a visible homoglyph, a pair of easily confused characters: the lowercase letter L and the uppercase letter i (l and I) of the Latin script are effectively indistinguishable."
So while I prefer Calibri as TNR has been the default for longer and hence is more boring to me, I can understand people might prefer a serif font for readability.
Yeah. I have a dis-a-bility. It’s now 2200 and I’ve been working since 0830. My eyes are tired and these 8’s look like 0’s, 5’s look like 6’s. What a tool.
Now! Everything in Fraktur! HH.
Does anyone else like to change the font on news articles using Inspect Element?
Also in Word etc, if I've got to spend a lot of time in a large document, I'll usually edit the paragraph body style temporarily to something sans serif. It's just better on screen.
Funnily enough this story, despite extolling the virtues of sans-serif fonts for reading on screens, is typeset in a serif font.
> Does anyone else like to change the font on news articles using Inspect Element?
Yes, for sites that use unreadably thin fonts, such as https://stratechery.com
i change it with refont
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/refont/
I never liked Calibri when it was pushed aggressively by MS and showed up everywhere - I prefer Arial or Helvetica for sans-serif, and think TNR is a good default for serif, with Computer Modern a close second.
Computer Modern is nice on paper but a bit spindly on screen, IMO: Knuth's other serif font, Concrete Roman, works better for that.
Looking through a selection of papers on serif vs non-serif fonts the conclusions seem to be that there is little difference when printed, but when viewing on-screen sans-serif is preferred.
What do you call a Banana Republic that has lots of different kinds of bananas?
> "This formatting standard aligns with the President’s One Voice for America’s Foreign Relations directive, underscoring the Department’s responsibility to present a unified, professional voice in all communications," it added.
This administration truly sets a high standard for professional communication...
> S.V. Dáte, HuffPost’s senior White House correspondent, asked the White House earlier this month who suggested Budapest, Hungary, as the location for an upcoming meeting between Trump and Putin. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt responded: “Your mom did.” White House Communications Director Steven Cheung then followed up: “Your mom.”
https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-polit...
Good - 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.
Times New Roman, Arial, Courier New, Calibri, Cambria… all of these fonts are proprietary.
But there are open-source metrically-compatible alternatives to all of them, commonly included in Linux distributions and/or office suites like LibreOffice.
Probably the most popular set is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croscore_fonts, with Tinos, Arimo, Cousine, and in the extended set Carlito and Caladea. The former most popular set is probably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts, with Liberation {Serif, Sans, Mono}.
But a given system is definitely less likely to have a Calibri alternative than a Times New Roman alternative.
The Croscore fonts ARE the Liberation fonts, just renamed.
I keep both for naming compatibility and also because the 1.0 Liberation versions had truetype hinting (2.0 and up did not).
Times New Roman is proprietary as well
I think there's clones of it that aren't.
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.
Yeah, we got it, you hate accessibility and dyslexic people.
> The department under Blinken in early January 2023 had switched to Calibri, a modern sans-serif font, saying this was a more accessible font for people with disabilities
That's interesting because I've long been under the impression that serif fonts promoted easier reading. As such, serif fonts could / should be considered more accessible.
Why is this a story? I'm fairly certain fonts change all of the time. Oh right, it's because they can't just make the change, they have to say something stupid about it. Republican voters, how are you not insulted? Is this really all it takes to get you to that voting booth?
Besides all the daily stuff that happens with the current US government, I'm _really_ excited (not in the best way) to see how the citizens of the USA, Europe and the whole world will deal with the aftermaths of the current government.
Strange times to live in.
Funny but my impression is that these days kerning is usually pretty bad with Serifed fonts in, at the very least, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Publisher, Microsoft Powerpoint, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Illustrator.
It is not so bad if you are using it for paragraphs but I can't stand the way serifed fonts come out if I am setting display text for a poster unless I manually take over and adjust the kerning. After I had this problem I was wondering if I was the only one or what other people did so I looked at posters people had put up around campus and had a really hard time finding posters where people were using serifed fonts in large sizes and my guess is people either start out with sans or they tried something with serifs but changed their mind because it looked wrong.
This is approaching Saparmurat Niyazov levels of weirdness.
I could consider anti-DEI sentiment that 'people jumping the lane' as morally acceptable (valid by itself but based on wrong assumptions), but this, this is just evil. Like why would you change font because it is harder to read for someone?
"Decorum" and Times New Roman. That's the equivalent of pointlessly plastering everything with marble and gold, you think you are doing Roman Empire meets Versailles, but ultimately, you're just being tacky.
Noto Serif would have been a better choice, it is far more readable and is capable of representing all languages in the world.
But then it's bigger, for example to replace Time New Roman 10 it would require Noto Serif 8.5.
Speaking of DEI: Stanley Morison, the inventor of Times New Roman, in collaboration with Victor Lardent, was one of the founders of The Guild of the Pope's Peace, an organization created to promote Pope Benedict XV's calls for peace in the face of the First World War. On the imposition of conscription in 1916 during First World War, he was a conscientious objector, and was imprisoned. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Morison#Early_life_and...>
For a moment I thought it had something to do with "Cuadernillos Rubio" [1]. They are small workbooks quite common in Spain for kids to learn how to write. However, the font they use is not Times New Roman...
[1] https://www.amazon.es/-/en/gp/product/8417427627?ref_=dbs_m_...
The verbiage in the PR reminds me of a bit from The Night Watch [1]:
> [...] and at some point, you will have to decide whether serifs are daring statements of modernity, or tools of hegemonic oppression that implicitly support feudalism and illiteracy
[1] https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1311_05-08_mickens.pdf
How far has the migration away from TNR to Calibri progressed? Is it redoing everything or is it just abandoning an incomplete ongoing migration that mostly just started?
I still can’t believe they switched to Calibri at all; the only people who should be using Calibri are people who don’t realize that Microsoft Word lets you pick other fonts.
I do wish they’d gone for a classier serif though; Garamond was right there.
You think the US govenment would go for a French typeface?
To be fair, they did choose a Roman one - one with proper Italics even.
A "thank you" for La Liberté éclairant le monde.
There's a certain je ne sais quoi to the US government's relationship with France.
I'm a Kings Caslon kinda guy myself. Partial to those more practical fonts. Can't beat 1800s print, they perfected the art by that point.
There's Clickbait and then this awful headline designed to give people heart attacks.
Who care about fonts? Boring. Why not jazz it up by mentioning coups during an administration that previously tried to pull of a coup attempt. Any administration officials names and coup should not be in the same sentence unless they attempt another one(or unless it's talking about the previous one).
Additional reporting from Gizmodo:
Marco Rubio Orders State Dept to Stop Using Calibri Font in Anti-DEI Push
https://gizmodo.com/marco-rubio-orders-state-dept-to-stop-us...
There was an event (or events?) in the past, when some past documents were forged, but with the default (in MS Word, I suppose) Calibre font, which was released years later. I wonder if this has something to do with it.
I love if someone remembers that event better and can provide a link. My memory serves it was about a decade or so ago.
As far as paper copies of laws and proclamations are concerned, the government can print them out in Wingdings for all I care. 99.999% of people will never see the physical paper. What matters are the digital files which, along with PDF, should be available to view in any font I want, whether Times New Roman or Comis Sans or braille.
They should be digitally signed PDFs. It's nearly 2026 and trivial to do.
Everything produced by congress should be stored in a git repository hosted in the Capitol.
> "To restore decorum and professionalism to the Department’s written work products and abolish yet another wasteful DEIA program, the Department is returning to Times New Roman as its standard typeface."
So to reiterate, the department decided to move on from the 1992 default Word font to the 2007 Word default (1 year after it was no longer the default).
Nothing is safe from politics when even a font choice has become "woke".
> To restore decorum and professionalism to the Department’s written work products…
Who defines decorum and professionalism? Because I’d say this change is anything but.
Then again, this is very partisan and so subjective. Still, I’m not a fan of a government pushing certain esthetics with such a BS justification.
Not exactly related, but this is also the government that keeps insisting that the tariffs are paid by the foreign exporters (now that's a BS justification by any government that warrants widespread panic). It's all about narratives. I wouldn't bother much with fact checking them.
Is it too off-topic or controversial to note that in January 1941 in an edict signed by Martin Bormann, head of the Nazi Party Chancellery and private secretary to Adolf Hitler, the Nazis called for a ban on the future use of Judenlettern (Jewish fonts) like Fraktur?
<https://web.archive.org/web/20151207071605/http://historywei...>
The left and right signalling is such a waste of everyone's time and effort. Reactive pettiness
Is it "signalling" when the left's change was for an accessibility reason, to enable more people to be able to easily read? Signaling means there's no tangible benefit to the change, so the Blinken's switch to a sans-serif font would not be signaling.
Rubio, however, specifically pointed out the symbolic (and malicious) gesture of his whole switch back to Times New Roman.
The left didn't react pettily. Please stop thinking the left are the right are the same when the facts show they are not. The left's change was for a demonstrative benefit. The right is doing it so fuck over people. You think these are the same.
>Is it "signalling" when the left's change was for an accessibility reason, to enable more people to be able to easily read?
Uh, yes.
[flagged]
Note that, even if that's all true (and I do agree that studies should have been conducted), the two positions are:
a) We made this change because we think it will help certain people
and
b) We made this change because we fundamentally disagree with attempts to help certain people, whether effective or not
I think b) is a lot worse than a). Or, to put it another way, has the current administration demonstrated a benefit from this change, or are they behaving at least as badly as "the left"?
No, you're just falling into the sort of left wing "people who disagree with me can only do so because they are a bad person" trap. You can read the full text of the actual memo (and a reasonable interpretation of it) below, but it appears to me that the principle reason as stated is that Calibri is less professional, inconsistent with all other government communications and even inconsistent letterheads on the very same department's material, and that appearance matters. It isn't in fact about "sticking it to the woke", but it does seem like the original decision to use Calibri was not based on anything and just about appearing to be woke.
https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/full_text_of_marco_rubio_...
> No, you're just falling into the sort of left wing "people who disagree with me can only do so because they are a bad person" trap.
I'm not sure where this conclusion came from. I even acknowledged that the original change was problematic.
> the principle reason as stated is that Calibri is less professional
That's fair, but it doesn't erase the 'DEI' comment in the memo. If that weren't there, we might actually be having a discussion about the merits of one font vs. another.
> It isn't in fact about "sticking it to the woke"
Again, that might be believable if the memo hadn't explicitly complained about DEI.
DEI was mentioned in a footnote, it didn't seem to be the main thrust of the memo. I agree it would have been better to not mention it at all, the decision is perfectly defensible on the basis of all the previous non-footnoted points.
I apologise for my first comment, it seems like those critical of the latest decision are painting a simplistic picture - "this was one side attempting to be kind vs other side deliberately being unkind". But it doesn't appear to be the case to me.
I think the concept of an accessible font is signaling. I don't think that Times New Roman is actually less legible than Calibri, and have never seen research claiming to find that Times New Roman in particular or serifs in general pose accessibility problems.
"Decisions I know nothing about are signaling" is a phenomenally uncurious approach to life.
I easily found some research by searching Google scholar:
https://www.scitepress.org/Papers/2021/109668/109668.pdf
It's not a big difference, but apparently TNR was the worst of the fonts tested for OCR.
But anyway, there was no "signaling" about the change to Calibri. No-one ever tried to make a political issue out of it the way Rubio is now.
I’m not sure what you think I mean by “signaling”. This is a study of OCR performance, with no attempt to measure practical accessibility issues caused by the font difference which you and I agree is not big. I’m still very skeptical that even a single State Department employee’s ability to do a good job depends on which font the department uses.
If you say that it doesn’t matter whether changing the font had a large practical impact, because it’s a gesture in the right direction or helps build a culture of accessibility, I would classify that as signaling.
Classify it how you like, but a gesture towards building a culture of accessibility (if indeed that’s what this was) is hardly comparable to an attempt to score points against political opponents.
Regardless of the reasons why, I'm glad. I cannot stand calibri. It's one of the ugliest fonts I've ever had to use, somehow looking uglier than even joke fonts like comic sans
> Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the Biden-era move to the sans serif typeface “wasteful,” casting the return to Times New Roman as part of a push to stamp out diversity efforts.
https://archive.ph/2025.12.10-001235/https://www.nytimes.com...
To actually reduce waste, they could have switched to a narrower typeface, such as Roboto Condensed. At least it would save some paper occasionally.
Roboto Condensed is excellent. It saves space so more words can be read with each eye movement (saccades) and is very clear.
see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_movement_in_reading
If only this administration would limit its actions to such forms of bikeshedding...
I just realized that if you google the font (e.g. "Calibri font"), you get the search results in that font. Neat!
Works for lots of other fonts too :)
There are very few ways in which US governance and/or regulation leads the developed world, but a huge (and surprising) one is the 1990 (!) Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). It is astonishingly, transformationally inclusive, and makes life better for every American (because everyone needs accessibility to different degrees, at different times).
Switching from Calibri back to Times New Roman "because DEI" 100% tracks with this administration's spiteful Project 2025 vandalism.
Slightly related but today I learned if you Google a font the site changes to that font.
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”.
BVT NOT TO BE CONFVSED UUITH TIMES OLD ROMAN.
Should've picked Charis SIL. It's a legible and serious serif font, doesn't make you look like you picked the boring Big Tech default and has explicitly Christian origins.
Explicit christian origin sounds like Jesus himself designed the font. But no, it's only the label the institute gave itself.
By that measure, I could create a font with explicit godly origin, because I see myself as a direct descendant of God.
US 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 enemy
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.
I am surprised they haven't come up with their own Truth font instead. "Everything is written in Truth".
I just wanted to add a comment that I never knew but if you google Times New Roman they display the entire Google web search results page in Times New Roman.
Good news: At least he didn't order the department to use Computer Modern.
Bad news: Missed opportunity for Fraktur to make a comeback.
This will make much more sense when the US announces its move away from Arabic numerals (too diverse) back to Roman numerals.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46212438
Reminds me of the Postal Service spending billions to change the logo from a stylized eagle to a... stylized eagle.
Fell asleep in America and woke up in Lilliput
Does that mean there will be a Times Caesar , a Times Lady , a Times Mistress and Universal Times new Rome Time? What a Time to be alive
Glad my government continues to work hard on solving the important problems that affect real people like me.
I'm definitely not suggesting someone make one, but Rubio sounds like an awfully good name for a font...
Slightly tangential, is there any chance this is motivated by profit or someone making money off this?
Otherwise, seems kinda benign and random.
Attention is a limited resource. When people spend it on something, they cannot spend it on something else at the same time. If you want to get away with something unpopular, do lots of unpopular things so the really bad stuff gets mixed in with all the rest. From the outside, it all looks very benign and random.
It's probably to ensure people keep talking about "woke" which tends to be good for the right.
Its exactly this. Choosing a font that makes things easier for disabled people, and those with limited sight is far too “woke” for 2025.
Don't a lot of courts use/mandate Century? Just use that. Better than TNR. If you can't afford a custom font…
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.)
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 decision is solely because the last guy did something and they can't let anything from the last administration stand.
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. But no: Making a font that is more compatible with screen reader technology is woke. Their words, not mine.
> 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...
"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 of document accessibility requests which he says did not decrease in the Calibri era.
Again, I say this not to nitpick or to dispute that it's kinda silly, but to emphasize that this is a provocation you shouldn't and don't need to rise to. The State Department's font choices do not matter, and it will not hurt anyone nor create a bad permission structure if they use Times New Roman. The only possible way this story could become even a tiny bit consequential is if Democrats take the bait and radicalize against serifs.
Fair point that they didn't say the word woke. I'll own that criticism.
I will assert that any justification for this that could be seen as legitimate is wiped away when they write anything about "Calibri is DEI" when there were valid reasons to consider it.
And believe me, I am well aware of where this ranks in the list of sins of the administration. It's a very small, very petty action in line with their broader ethos.
They definitely did use the term 'DEI', though, which is pretty much interchangeable as far as they're concerned.
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.
What's wrong with Fraktur?
Fraktur is often associated with the German far right, because it's a mostly German thing that nationalists can hang on to.
Funnily enough, it was Goebbels who banned it and required everyone to change to Latin scripts.
Got to hand it to them - Fraktur is an annoying font. It looks cool, though.
This makes me want to run for President on the platform of Comic Sans for all government documents.
The motivation is truly awful, but the result? Thank goodness. Calibri just screams unprofessional
Roboto Condensed's description reads like something written by wine journalist:
Roboto has a dual nature. It has a mechanical skeleton and the forms are largely geometric. At the same time, the font features friendly and open curves. While some grotesks distort their letterforms to force a rigid rhythm, Roboto doesn’t compromise, allowing letters to be settled into their natural width. This makes for a more natural reading rhythm more commonly found in humanist and serif types.
A Sancerre with a long, sweet finish.
Calibri was the default MS Word from 2007 until July 2023, when Aptos took over.
Calibri became the State font in Jan 2023.
They'll change it to blackletter next
https://2021-2025.state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-on-np...
Secretary Antony Blinken on NPR's Wait Wait...Don’t Tell Me! About the U.S. Department of State moving from Times New Roman to Calibri.
Compare this:
> calling his predecessor Antony Blinken's decision to adopt Calibri a "wasteful" diversity move
to
> SECRETARY BLINKEN: First, I’m called to make very weighty decisions (inaudible).
> QUESTION: Oh. Type joke.
> SECRETARY BLINKEN: And I’m always trying to be a font of wisdom, (inaudible).
Just... ugh. People voted for all of this non-stop vitriol? I'd like to have a post that added something meaningful but all I have to add is frustration with humanity.
"To serif or not to serif?" that is now a question of our Times.
I'm amazed by all these silly priorities some people can find.
The first-world problems!
I'm surprised he didn't get Hugo Boss to design a font
really good 1st of April joke !!! rotfl
ahem... We're not the 1st of April...
But you [sometimes] still have to use courier filing in the courts?
The Supreme Court requires Century (which for any use other than maybe a newspaper is infinitely better than Times New Roman—and for a newspaper, Times is better than TNR.)
You follow the style guide or rules for the court in which you are filing. The US Supreme Court, for example, does not use Courier.
Pretty soon they'll only accept crayon.
The ole' turning around a failing effort with a rebrand.
His boss' posts on Truth Social should be in Comic Sans.
Just remember that when the CERN announced they finally could prove the existence of the Higgs boson, they did it using Comic Sans
https://blog.scottlogic.com/2012/07/05/the-higgs-boson-comic...
To be honest, in the official papers they did not use it for either CMS or ATLAS.
If Trump finds out he'll start "truthing" in Comic Sans and expecting a Nobel Prize in Physics.
yes, so wasteful to select a different font in 2025. Real cost-saving measure switching from the evil woke-font calibri to the strong masculine Times New Roman. Thank God Marco Rubio was on the case to set the universe back into alignment with this big-balled move.
Terry Gilliam at his most deranged couldn't dream up this nonsense.
Such a dingbat move
A Glorious Font for the Times New Roman Caesar
So if this one is a dictator, does that mean the next one is an emperor?
This admin does like Roman stuff- like their salute
You know what they always say…never waste a good crisis.
This is our opportunity to tell our friends that neither Times New Roman nor Calibri are very good fonts.
If they’re using Word—and they definitely are—Aptos is a better choice than either.
If they want to look fancy and have a serif in their life, maybe they could try a little Cambria.
But if they have a twinkle in their eye and seem like they want to learn, take a moment to introduce them to the wide and glorious world of Roboto. Tell them about the wonders of medium and light and semi-bold and extra-bold and wide and display and condensed and custom ligatures. Give them a taste of what real office typography could’ve been if Microsoft didn’t absolutely destroy it in the 90’s.
Open their mind. Show them the truth. This is your time.
it's a joy https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Roboto and especially https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Roboto+Condensed
What was wasted?
Surprised they didn’t go with .
Dog whistle for transphobic people.
TIL: if you google Times New Roman, you get Google search results in Times New Roman.
You also get Calibri if you search for it, but not Zapf Dingbats.
> https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/12/addr...
> window.getComputedStyle(document.querySelector('.entry-content > p')).fontFamily
> '"Instrument Sans", sans-serif'
I guess The White House hasn't received the memo yet about how important serifs is for "presenting a unified, professional voice in all communications". What a joke.
This change sounds like that "waste, fraud, and abuse" stuff.
If you add up all the government memos, forms, letters, contracts, publications, everything printed globally…
“wow. many serif. so pointy. much ink. such waste!” — Kabosu, probably
I support the change, though the rationale used for it seems to me to be nonsense.
Times New Roman might not be the world's most beautiful font, but at least is a little bit less atrocious than Calibri (which is awful). So, whatever the rationale invoked, I welcome the change.
Sometimes, when I have to work on documents which will be shared with many users, I use Times New Roman as serif, and Arial as a sans serif. Both choices are (admittedly in my very subjective opinion) better than Calibri, and it's almost guaranteed that every PC will have these fonts available, or at least exact metric equivalents of them.
I had to check this was actually Reuters and not The Onion. eye roll
I'm dyslexic and I much prefer to read Times New Roman to Calibri. I think it's a good move.
Wasn't there was a previous "coup" that changed it from TNR to Calibri? TNR is nicer though.
This headline is obnoxious
Make Arial Great Again
The princess and the pea.
Today is a good day to learn about Nazi Germany's Normal Type Decree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwabacher#History
Good, and not because of the diversity drama that the US government wants to shoehorn in here. Any font that makes the uppercase "i" and the lowercase "L" look the same is absolute garbage. Yes, I have a strong opinion about this!
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiqua%E2%80%93Fraktur_disput...
Didn't I read somewhere that serif fonts are better for dyslexia
The ole DEIA font.
And now I know why the default font was changed in Word. Arg. Don't think I like Times New Roman but it was the recommend font for academic papers in Brazil (and the recommendation still persists).
I figured the big scandal would be some bloated government contract shelling out millions for Calibri licenses. But nope, turns out the guy just… doesn’t like the font. What an absolute clown show.
This is silly as Montserrat is the only true choice.
The only non-partisan choice is comic sans.
Seriously, with all the shit going on in the world, these guys spend time thinking about the wokeness of computer fonts?! What a clown show. Strike-through this administration.
Could anyone please explain how this is "news" worthy? There are literally more pressing issues (inflation, wars, etc), and covering this is asinine, to say the least.
The story is that people with better things to do are spending their time on this
This argument has never, in all of human history, been made in good faith.
It really is just a bunch of petulant (predominantly, but not exclusively) old fucks throwing tantrums at any form of progress or change whatsoever, huh.
I for one am grateful someone is finally standing up to these lunatic radical typographers and their diversity, equity and italics tyranny.
>>decorum and professionalism Yes, the hallmark of the Trump administration.
The current administration will do anything to distract folks from the corruption, fraud, grift and incompetence.
And it works!
Apparently sans-serif is "woke" or something. Cleek's Law meets Poe's.
Why the fuck does anybody care? Also is there no way to view these documents in the font of you choice????
The OP successfully included excerpts from the order without changing to times new roman so CLEARLY this is not insurmountable for anybody who actually notices irrelevant details such as this.
Comic Sans might have been a more appropriate choice. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Once again Garamond is passed over. I truly live in dark times.
Bullshit looks better with serifs?
Ah yes Calibri is now "DEI". Rubio don't you have a real job?
It's beyond satire that US conservatives are now somehow upset about certain fonts being woke.
Previously:
Times New Roman is being phased out at the State Department, replaced by Calibri
207 points|danso|3 years ago|256 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34427504
HN commentors on this font change harp on about how it's a waste of time (which it of course is), but that font change seemed to receive a more bland reaction. Funny.
Well yeah? It's not about the font, it's about the pettiness of the declared reasons for the reversal
Even if you believe the previous administration switching fonts was virtue signaling, then by the same logic you have to also believe this is just virtue signalling.
I'm really out of the loop on this.
What virtue is being signaled by who?
I know people get real touchy about fonts, but I have a hard time understanding why this is even a news article.
Because politicians are making political choices on fonts rather than leaving those matters to technicians.
Just guessing from what is written in the article: Calibri once was chosen by the former administration for accessibility reasons. Maybe the virtue signaling being that Calibri isn't great with respect to accessibility (and IMHO wasn't even designed for it in the first place).
Per the State Department in 2023:
https://x.com/John_Hudson/status/1615486871571935232
> fonts like Times New Roman have serifs ("wings" and "feet") or decorative, angular features that can introduce accessibility issues for individuals with disabilities who use Optical Character Recognition technology or screen readers. It can also cause visual recognition issues for individuals with learning disabilities.
> On January 4, 2023, in support of the Department's iCount Campaign on disability inclusion (reftels), Secretary Blinken directed the Department to use a more accessible font. Calibri has no wings and feet and is the default font in Microsoft products and was recommended as an accessibility best practice by the Secretary's Office of Diversity and Inclusion in collaboration with the Executive Secretariat and the Bureau of Global Talent Management's Office of Accessibility and Accommodations.
In 2023, the US State Department signalled how virtuous it was, by moving from the previously-default MS Office font to the then-currently-default MS Office font. The current MS Office default font is Aptos, place your bets on what the State Department is going to switch the font to in 3 years time.
As far as I know, font choice has no zero effect on screen readers, which ask compatible software what words are on screen and read them out. There is evidence that serifs cause visual recognition issues for some individuals, but there's also evidence they aid recognition for different individuals.
It probably helped everyone to choose 14pt Calibri over 12pt Times New Roman, as the font is more legible on LCD screens.
The virtue being signalled by the current administration is that everything their predecessors did was wrong and they're literally going to reverse everything out of sheer pettiness. If anything, they should acknowledge the president's long friendship with Epstein and pick Gill Sans as the default. That would be the ultimate "anti-woke" move I think.
Calibri is a Sans Serif font and because it has been the default Microsoft Office font for more than a decade, it is fake email job haver coded (i.e. it appeals to young and middle-aged women who work in HR, this demographic being predominantly Democrat). Times New Roman is a Serif font which looks old and official to cater to boomers and has Roman in it to appeal to Zoomers who want to RETVRN with a V to tradition.
(I didn’t read the article as this is a non-story, but I’m definitely right).
As if anybody would be daft enough to deny that you are of course absolutely right, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/us/politics/rubio-state-d... has this additional detail:
> Mr. Rubio's directive, under the subject line "Return to Tradition: Times New Roman 14-Point Font Required for All Department Paper,"
Yep, I've seen what craziness happens when the admin is woke, and I've seen the craziness when it's "anti-woke" and I preferred woke. At least woke didn't kidnap people into unmarked vans for writing a college newspaper article. I don't agree with woke, but they won't send me to Guatemala torture prison bc I don't agree
No? If signalling led to an decision, the reversal is not automatically signalling based. Calibri is just not a good font.
> present a unified, professional voice in all communications
Might want to start by banning tweeting then.
Professionalism: "Quiet piggy. Are you stupid? You don't have to embarrass our guest by asking a question like that. You're a terrible reporter. Horrible. Insubordinate. You're ugly both inside and out, and a nasty person."
I am staunchly anti-Republican.
In my opinion, the sole cultural domain in which Republicans are far stronger than Democrats is graphic design.
If you do not have a strong graphic design background, I'd urge you to avoid taking sides on this matter on the basis of party affiliation.
This is good politics from the Republicans.
In my opinion it is disastrous for Democrats to align themselves with mediocre cultural products.
Microsoft has a very close relationship with the US government and over the last 20+ years has demonstrated extremely low quality standards. The US government's shift to using Calibri is clearly a consequence of this close relationship.
Claims about the "readability" of Calibri in comparison to Times New Roman are spurious and unverifiable; very seriously type foundries say things this about every single new typeface released.
Frankly, Calibri is an ugly and poorly designed typeface. It is Microsoft's Vista-era Helvetica dupe. It is inferior to Times New Roman.
If you're defending Calibri over the most popular typeface of all time, I hope it's (somehow) coming from an aesthetically minded place
I’m surprised this administration did not chose Comic Sans as the default font.
Rubio looks more like a Papyrus person.
Can Comic Sans do all caps?
Perhaps it is time to get traction on "tabs vs spaces". /s
If they want to look like a proper government then the correct answer is monospace and in ALL CAPS just like FAA NOTAMS, obviously.
I'm glad to see that a government elected by rural, blue-collar workers is tackling the issues those workers care most about.
/s
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But.... and this is important, it's not funny.
"Here is a thing that makes a slight difference, with no cost, to a small percentage of people"
"Nah, woke. Let's make it worse for them."
There is nothing funny about performative cruelty
I'm with John Gruber, who is hardly a fan of this administration:
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/12/10/state-departmen...
"Calibri does convey a sense of casualness — and more so, modernity — that is not appropriate for the U.S. State Department. And I do not buy the argument that Calibri is somehow more accessible for those with low vision or reading disabilities. People with actual accessibility needs should be catered to, but they need more than a sans serif typeface, and their needs should not primarily motivate the choice for the default typeface."
Official departmental paperwork shouldn't look clownish.
The same John Gruber that, quote tweeting a news article about Israel closing off phone and internet services to Gazans, wrote "Fuck around and find out"
> And I do not buy the argument that Calibri is somehow more accessible for those with low vision or reading disabilities
Oh well that settles it, John Gruber doesn’t buy the argument. Wrap it up and let’s head home, folks, this one’s settled, no need to refer to any actual research or evidence.
> they need more than a sans serif typeface,
Agreed.
So... why are the administration going in the opposite direction?
> Official departmental paperwork shouldn't look clownish.
Oh. It's about looking clownish. Right. OK. Pull up a chair, this might take a while, and we will get to typefaces pretty late on, I'll be honest
With no cost?
I hadn't planned on spending my evening googling the pay grade of government officials, calculating the time taken to change a font on Microsoft Word and extrapolating that over a year.
But I'm game if you are?
Jupyter notebooks or excel?
I'm not talking about monetary cost.
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If you had read the article, you would know the answer to this question.
Calibri is a font designed to be easier to read on screens, which is where documents are primarily read in 2025. Switching to using Calibri as the default was a meaningful change that provided improved accessibility at literally no cost to anyone.
Switching back to Times New Roman, a serif font that is provably more difficult to read on screens is yet another act of performative cruelty by this administration who seemingly operates with "the cruelty is the point" as one of its core tenets.
Is screen readability the only value to consider?
> If you had read the article
Please read the rules.
> Please read the rules.
You made a low effort post, and I pointed out how if you had put in the effort to read the article prior to commenting you would have gotten the answer to your question.
Would you like me to be more patronizing to you and say, "The article clearly states which of the font changes was the performative one and which was meaningful."?
But sure, buddy, run off to hide behind a site rule the moment you get called out for a low effort post you made that is breaking at least two rules itself:
- Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
- Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
> Is screen readability the only value to consider?
Whether it is "the only value to consider" or not is beside the point, and you know it. The Trump Administration's only value they considered is "Biden did it, so we're going to undo it." They considered nothing else. You know. I know it. Everyone knows it. Why do we know it? Because they have made it abundantly clear that they have no idea what "DEI" actually is, so they just slap that label on anything the previous administration did, put out an order rolling it back, and use it as a wedge issue.
If he was actually worried about whether a san-serif typeface was worse for printed documents, he could have simply ordered that all printed documents must use TNR or any of the other better options that exist. But he isn't. He's simply concerned with killing "DEI," where "DEI" just means whatever they decide it means today.
Performative? The one that you read about. The one that had a press release, the one that had articles on social media that you are commenting on.
Meaningful? The one that looked into which font was more readable, for the most people
Do you have trouble reading Times New Roman? Every computer I used growing up used it in much lower resolution.
No, but I’m also not an accessibility expert, so my opinion here’s pretty irrelevant.
This is a performative change.
The change to Calibri was meaningful.
Because Calibri is an easier to read font on screens, which is where a lot more reading is being done.
Since it was done as an accessibility measure, it is seen as something for "inclusion" which is part of the scary "DEI" (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion). So it had to go, because forbid we do something that makes things slightly easier for people.
Let's even say (incorrectly, probably) that the switch to Calibri was "performative" or "virtue signaling". That's, in my opinion, significantly less terrible than performative cruelty or anti-virtue signaling.
I'll never understand this silly take. they just took a venezuelan oil tanker. is that a joke to you? you might disagree with what they're doing, or argue they are incompetent, but joke is very strange take. they are very serious. ask some undocumented immigrants in the USA about how much they're joking.
in fact - any country seeing what trump is doing both domestically and internationally and not taking their actions potentially against them seriously is stupid imho.
I think by 'joke' people mean "their actions are unreasonable to the point of ridicule, and were they less consequential would be akin to the performance of a circus clown instead of a diligent policy maker."
But the rest of us just shorten that to "joke".
Thank you - exactly what I meant. I thought it was a common understanding when used in this context.
So it’s a partisan word then and basically devoid of meaning and consistency across political lines. When hasn’t the us political class been a joke by such a definition…? Perhaps when we owned slaves, or interned the Japanese?
I'm laughing at their sheer incompetence. This is coming from a minority who has been targeted by US governments policies and has lost friends because of this.
Yes, the US government is a laughing stock while we have sympathy for those negatively impacted by the decisions made by these incompetent idiots.
you and I have very different definitions of joke it seems.
I think you just need to read more. Your comprehension of common terms in context is lacking.
Obviously they would take a Venezuelan oil tanker. Oil is the only reason Trump is interested in Venezuela.
https://intelpoint.co/insights/venezuela-saudi-arabia-and-ir...
Anyone who is laughing is a sucker and an idiot. You keep thinking this administration is incompetent, when in fact they are achieving all their goals. At this point anyone saying they are laughable should be assumed to be part of the propaganda. Ho ho ho, looks at the silly Nazis with their silly swastika.
what
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Similarly, under the Biden administration there was a push for memory safety and adopting the Rust programming language.
Now memory safety sounds too woke, and Trump administration will be moving back to pure C.
This is Michael Scott levels of managerial nonsense, bloody hell.
Is Trump incapable of hiring anyone borderline competent?
The only thing these morons understand are surface level appearances. That's why we have so many TV people.
- Trump: The Apprentice
- Defense: Hegseth: Fox News
- Transportation: Sean Duffy: Real World / Road Rules
- Education: Linda McMahon: WWE (yes, wrestling)
... I don't feel like going any further, it's too depressing.
Edit: I just realized that Duffy is SecTrans because he was on Road Rules.
Dear Lord... I'd not picked up on this- if true (I need to validate it for myself).
I forgot Dr. Oz, who is in charge of Health and Human Services.
Lots of articles about this; here's a random one: https://deadline.com/gallery/fox-news-personalities-trump-wh...
Secretary of HHS is RFk Jr, oz is in charge of Medicare and Medicaid
Whoops, you're right. Too many clowns in this circus.
I'm sorry but the vaccine-skeptic RFKjr is US Health Secretary?
Welcome to 2025
The "Idiocracy" movie is now a documentary from the future.
I don't know that being a contestant in a couple of reality tv shows in college makes Sean Duffy a TV person
McMahon on the other hand was founder and president of WWE
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https://ktla.com/news/gop-lawmaker-solicitation-arrest/
"TDS" is not a real thing, you clown. Grow up.
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...says the person who hasn't mastered basic grammar.
You must be proud of mastering the grammar, aren't you? I guess there is nothing else to be proud of.
If you are going to make snide comments about the intelligence of others, be prepared for your own to be scrutinized.
If you reduce intelligence to knowledge of grammar, I can just pity you. Must be good to feel superiour.
Congratulations on missing the entire point.
Blinken was the name of the blind character sidekick in Men in Tights back in the day, so the preference of an actually less appropriate font for reading is on script.
There's a difference between "Let's use Calibri to make our documents more readable" and "Let's go back to TNR becuase using Calibri is woke nonsense by Biden's guy". They could have used pretty much any other reason to switch back to TNR, but decided to make it a childish DEI/"woke" jab.
Is there any evidence that sans-serif typefaces are more readable? I’ve previously seen headlines claiming the opposite.
You can find evidence for both sides, because life is more complicated than that. Do you have 20/20 vision? Hi-def screen? High contrast? Floaters in your eyes? Cataracts? Are you tired? How is the text laid out? Line spacing?
Literally all of these can impact the answer.
Ok, now insert "broadly" or "generally" into the previous comment and respond to what they actually meant.
Mixed evidence like they said, it depends
You understand both justifications are actually made up? As there is no evidence Calibri has better readability, certainly it doesn't have anything to do with wokeism.
This feels like dystopia, sane management or administrations should delegate this stuff to experts, not politicians.
We live in the world were everything is now "vibed" really.
Stopped clock, twice right?