“correspondence between headquarters and overseas embassies, known as Diplomatic Notes, for years had to be accompanied by a legal-size (8 1/2-inch by 14-inch) cover sheet. That wasn't really a big deal when the notes were drafted on typewriters. But Ted Strickler, head of State's Office of Foreign Missions, found that since the introduction of the desktop computer, his employees were spending a lot of extra time formatting the notes and fiddling with the paper in the printer. He checked to see whether he could use standard 8 1/2-inch by 11-inch paper for the Diplomatic Notes, instead. He was told to submit a formal action memorandum suggesting the change. Strickler submitted the suggestion to his superiors in January 1999. A year went by. He found out his action memorandum had been lost, so he resubmitted it. In early 2001-two years after he recommended the change in the first place-the department approved the use of standard paper. "If anything so innocuous as changing the size of the paper for Diplomatic Notes was so exceedingly difficult, how difficult would it be to make more important changes?" Strickler says.“
8.5”x11” is a standard size for the US and Canada, but not for the rest of the world. Which leads to the eternal problems for any NGOs or contractors working for the US government overseas who have to source Letter size for US gov partners and A4 for local partners!
Yep. Every time I have to renew my Australian passport I have to buy a ream of A4 paper. Every time I forget where last time's ream was stored. I suspect someday I'll find thousands of sheets somewhere lost in my basement.
In the Philippines, it is even worse. At least four standards (A4, Letter, Legal, and Long Bond), and all of them are necessary for communication with various government agencies such as BIR.
Powell began his term in January of 2001. It isn't clear how "early" in 2001 this change was made, but it seems to have been in process well before the Powell term as SoS and only completed shortly after he took office.
> "If anything so innocuous as changing the size of the paper for Diplomatic Notes was so exceedingly difficult, how difficult would it be to make more important changes?" Strickler says.
How difficult was it to change the size? Getting the official requirement changed was difficult; what would have happened if he hadn't bothered and had just started sending everything on normal paper?
US Government Letter Paper is 8x10.5 inches, though I think it's used only for internal documents. Probably too much inertia to try to change it to 8.5x11.
I never understand why someone in charge of making one specific simple choice, ends up making a remarkable dumb decision. Why, unless you are doing things unethically, would you go for a licensed font?
It's not like this is a hard problem to solve more than adequately with open and more accessible alternatives.
Aside from licensing, usability studies show that serif fonts are more legible than sans serif fonts, so I have no idea where they came up with the idea that somehow they're harder to read for people with disabilities when all prior research I'm aware of has shown the opposite.
Yes! This a thousand times. Many universities I know now discourage sans-serif fonts for screen reasons and prefer Arial because one study showed a slight preference for those who were dyslexic. The evidence is far from strong [1] and frankly I feel like doing a meta-analysis of it in my spare time. I really, really, really dislike Arial and find it harder to read than others.
I vaguely remember something about there being a difference on printed paper vs screens when it comes to serifs. But also, aren't most aircraft controls labeled in something like Futura? I believe the Apollo program and other aerospace studies decided that was the most legible.
I thought the same thing. Surely it must be a function of the prevalence of these fonts though. In a hypothetical world where 90% of text you read is in sans serif I'd have to imagine that this would tilt the readability study results in sans serif's favor. I wonder if the studies attempt to control for this somehow?
Logistics probably. With out a doubt you know this font is deployed on most systems around the world. It’s maintained by one of the largest companies in the world. And its provenance can be assured.
Now I want to make a custom Times New Roman font with unpredictable ligatures and 0-width vector data so poorly monitored systems create false data when printed in hardcopy.
Yeah, I was wondering if they finally upgraded computers with Win XP and Office 2003 (with default font Times New Roman) to Win 10/11 and Office 2021/Office 365 (with default font Calibri).
I would hope someone who don't know the context or effect of a choice they are making, at the least consults with someone who does? This isn't rocket science to get right.
A shame they didn’t opt for Public Sans, which was designed by the US Web Design System team. Though I see it only supports Latin characters at the moment, which might make it unsuitable for use at State.
I believe that font is primarily intended for interfaces rather than documents. The design decisions are quite different between those contexts, or that's what I've heard.
I wonder "how many fonts we need". Is there a good, open resource for FOSS fonts, to compare them, and preferably a curation?
I agree with others on here, though. Everything our government does, and produces, from an IT/development perspective which is not a "competitive advantage" (security, etc.) should be open. Why there would be an official directive to choose a non-open font when so many open fonts exist, is beyond me.
Interesting that the memo claims that sans serif fonts are preferred to serif fonts for screen reader users and people with disabilities. I thought the exact opposite was true. Is there any definitive research on which type of font is more accessible?
That last link (the book) is a fantastic literature review, but every chapter basically concludes that despite some results going each way, there is no statistically significant readability difference between sans serif and serif typefaces, whether on paper or on screen, or whether the reader has various disabilities.
Sans serif fonts are preferable only on low-resolution displays (this includes 1080p) or at small point sizes, because in this cases the good serif fonts cannot be rendered correctly.
The classic serif fonts cannot be rendered correctly at low DPI not only due to their serifs (which must be enlarged at low resolutions, to avoid their disappearance; this transforms all classic serif typefaces into uglier slab-serif typefaces), but also due to their "contrast", i.e. because they have both thin and thick lines (which are equalized in width at low resolutions, distorting the glyphs). Some of the better modern sans serif typefaces, e.g. Optima, also cannot be rendered correctly at low DPI, due to their variable-width lines.
On high DPI displays, the preference for sans serif or for serif is driven mainly by the familiarity with the tested typefaces, so it is impossible to predict from the results of a half hour test, where the people may see for the first time some typefaces, which of them they would prefer after using them continuously for six months.
One of our employees is blind, and screen readers (JAWS is what he uses) can be fairly finicky. For a case where you are looking at or editing the document in MS Word it doesn't matter, since if the text is readily accessible it will ignore the font. However, in something like a pdf or image it needs to OCR the text, and certain fonts are easier to read.
I happen to know this because we ended up needing to rework our training documentation, which we supply as pdfs that were exported from Word. The screen reader needs to figure out the order of the text in the pdf, and by default word can end up exporting the text laid out in a way that causes the screen reader to parse the text out of order. There are accessibility options that can resolve this, but we ended up changing the font since that resolved the problem without needing to ensure the correct options were set everytime someone needs to update the training manuals.
The issue is with OCR. Imagine something that was printed(for being physically signed or filed into a cabinet, for example) and rescanned into an image or PDF.
Both printing and scanning is lossy with lots of noise and artifacts.
The article is saying that serif fonts are harder to OCR.
I find any document written in serif feels more professional and well considered. As a result, when I look at older documents, it seems that the past had higher standards for content and presentation.
Seeing a Calibri memo from the state department would make me think that it’s illegitimate.
It's weird because we have far better and more convenient tools for content and presentation now, but we're so lazy that we make poor use of them and so the output is worse.
The Microsoft empire is bigger than several nation states.
IBM research used to examine UX. The IBM top brass deciding to pay over $35B+ for a UNIX-like when they have an authentic UNIX of their very own which is going to a boneyard in India suggests that kind of UX research isn't front of mind and funded to decide which font is best.
Eh, better to name the free fonts something that doesn't give an "I can't afford the name brand" vibe. Nothing about freedom even needs to be in the name. To most people, all fonts are already free cause they cost nothing.
What I want to know is what they were doing before 2004 when they adopted Times New Roman. Courier? Gothic?
Calibri is a nice screen-reading typeface. It is likely that "upstairs" reads on a screen, but I wouldn't bet that much on it.
Times New Roman was designed to shove as many letters into a multi-column newspaper page as possible. It's atrocious for anything else, and should be confined to whence it came, print newspapers. It's only the default because it is the default. Good riddance.
I imagine this memo reading like that one in Snow Crash about the inter-office toilet paper sharing system, and employees dutifully reading the memo for exactly X number of minutes to ensure their computer's tracking software notes that they've read the article for the appropriate amount of time.
I've wondered in the past what the cultural influence of font legibility is. I'd imagine someone who grew up reading serif fonts would feel much more comfortable reading a document with a serif typeface than someone like myself who doesn't interact much with serif fonts.
For me serif fonts look kind of off and weird. On the other hand monospaced fonts look strangely beautiful to me so I use monospaced fonts on my blog and in other personal writings. I'm guessing that preference isn't biological though, but more likely due to me spending every day reading and writing code. My brain is just best adapted for working with monospaced fonts.
I think about questions like this often when it comes to UI/UX decisions because I think some modern UI/UX is arguably objectively bad in a world where there only exists subjective users. For example, the qwerty keyboard is god awful, but does it make sense for the next Apple Macbook to ship with a dvorak keyboard layout to fix querty's UX issues? Probably not.
> someone who grew up reading serif fonts would feel much more comfortable reading a document with a serif typeface than someone like myself who doesn't interact much with serif fonts
I grew up reading books, so I suppose I count as someone who grew up reading serif fonts. I find sans serif fonts to be incredibly difficult to read. They only are a win for small on-screen text since there aren't enough pixels for serifs. I have a sans-serif font for my window titles. Reading more than a single paragraph in sans is fatiguing to me.
I'm guessing it's because those were the shapes that were delivered for the Latin characters in one of the earliest CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) fonts, the MingLiU:
https://www.pickafont.com/fonts/MingLiU.html
I guess us westerners see it a lot because it was much simpler for the manufacturers to just use 1 font file for all the different locales of the gadgets (either the cheapo MP3-player, or the label printer).
My browser renders this in sans serif, but adds serifs to I. I'm on firefox/linux and it's defaulting to the css `sans-serif` and I don't have the energy to research how to find what that defaults to right now.
Dev tools → Inspector panel → Fonts subpanel → Fonts Used, and you can hover over each to see highlighted which glyphs are being rendered in that font.
I would imagine that it isn't changing font for the l specifically but just has a sans font that includes a tail on the l. This text box that I'm using, for instance, is Dejavu Sans Mono which does exactly that.
As one of the very few moon dwellers who finds Calibri fucking blinding to read, I hate this. Times New Roman all day every day, or any of Arial/Tahoma/Verdana for sans serif.
I spent probably half an hour figuring out how to make my Google Docs default to Times New Roman for any new docs after. It's a good font. Calibri is trash.
Even worse, a widely-used design doc template here uses a title-only font in the body. I was wondering why it's so hard to read, even for a sans serif font, until I noticed that.
I think they are conflating "serif" with "Times" Times is a very narrow font, which has all sorts of readability issues (it's very readable for the space it takes up, but damn it's narrow). I have yet to see an OCR do better on a serif font that has a bit more girth to it. In particular I see things like "III" as being impossible to read for both OCRs, and (in the absence of context) humans in sans-serif fonts.
I'd put up a nice sans typeface with single-storey "g" (the double-storey "g" is hard to read for a lot more people than one might think) against a sans-serif any day.
I think design trends ebb and flow. We're currently in a period of strong minimalism. But sooner or later some designers will start using serif typefaces in order to stand out and the trend will reverse.
Although my brain thinks any serif font document as more “legitimate”, I can’t think of any reason to use serif in a world of such high resolution screens and printers.
I think you got that backwards. The reason why sans serif fonts became popular is because computer displays are low resolution. Before that, they were often used for ads because they were deemed eccentric. On a modern, high resolution display with hundreds of DPIs you can have all the serifs you want.
Not everyone has a high resolution screen and printer, and it is still important to communicate to those who cannot afford them.
Additionally, I find it hard to discern the difference between 0 and O and I, 1, and l in many sans serif fonts (although the same can be said for some serif fonts).
You are right. Times Roman was not originally intended to look how it does when printed now. Originally, the thin lines spread and the pointed serifs contracted so the result looked somewhat like Century. You can see examples of this in technical books published in the 1950s-60s.
Boeing uses inches. Not feet, just inches. The drafting scales (rulers) we used were in inches, but divided into tenths and hundredths of an inch. The ball bearing catalog what in inches, but rather strange values, which turned out to be mm translated to inches.
I had a hard time recently trying to find a scale in inches and tenths and hundredths. It's just easier to user. I'm kinda sorry I sold my drafting equipment.
Calibri was designed for low-res screens [1]. "De Groot created Calibri in the early 2000s, as part of a collection of fonts for enhanced screen reading. “I designed it in quite a hurry,” he says."
Soon enough fonts will be an anachronism. We won't read things serially, we will download information into our brains via cyberneural uploads. Then we can get rid of the dead trees and petrochemicals.
Allegedly during Colin Powell’ time at the State Department there was quite an ordeal to change paper sizes for communication between offices: https://www.govexec.com/magazine/2001/06/the-powell-leadersh...
“correspondence between headquarters and overseas embassies, known as Diplomatic Notes, for years had to be accompanied by a legal-size (8 1/2-inch by 14-inch) cover sheet. That wasn't really a big deal when the notes were drafted on typewriters. But Ted Strickler, head of State's Office of Foreign Missions, found that since the introduction of the desktop computer, his employees were spending a lot of extra time formatting the notes and fiddling with the paper in the printer. He checked to see whether he could use standard 8 1/2-inch by 11-inch paper for the Diplomatic Notes, instead. He was told to submit a formal action memorandum suggesting the change. Strickler submitted the suggestion to his superiors in January 1999. A year went by. He found out his action memorandum had been lost, so he resubmitted it. In early 2001-two years after he recommended the change in the first place-the department approved the use of standard paper. "If anything so innocuous as changing the size of the paper for Diplomatic Notes was so exceedingly difficult, how difficult would it be to make more important changes?" Strickler says.“
8.5”x11” is a standard size for the US and Canada, but not for the rest of the world. Which leads to the eternal problems for any NGOs or contractors working for the US government overseas who have to source Letter size for US gov partners and A4 for local partners!
Yep. Every time I have to renew my Australian passport I have to buy a ream of A4 paper. Every time I forget where last time's ream was stored. I suspect someday I'll find thousands of sheets somewhere lost in my basement.
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In the Philippines, it is even worse. At least four standards (A4, Letter, Legal, and Long Bond), and all of them are necessary for communication with various government agencies such as BIR.
I did not even know anything else than A4 existed, I just learned that now
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Why would anyone care if they received the other paper size? The differences are tiny.
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Does it really matter? Letter size is close enough to A4 that I doubt anyone but paper nerds would notice
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Powell began his term in January of 2001. It isn't clear how "early" in 2001 this change was made, but it seems to have been in process well before the Powell term as SoS and only completed shortly after he took office.
And still not even A4
A/B/C paper series formats are based on metrics system and therefore, morally evil and unfit for the US consumption.
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> "If anything so innocuous as changing the size of the paper for Diplomatic Notes was so exceedingly difficult, how difficult would it be to make more important changes?" Strickler says.
How difficult was it to change the size? Getting the official requirement changed was difficult; what would have happened if he hadn't bothered and had just started sending everything on normal paper?
US Government Letter Paper is 8x10.5 inches, though I think it's used only for internal documents. Probably too much inertia to try to change it to 8.5x11.
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No wonder State Department is called Foggy Bottom (I know the real reason) but it lives up to its name.
I never understand why someone in charge of making one specific simple choice, ends up making a remarkable dumb decision. Why, unless you are doing things unethically, would you go for a licensed font?
It's not like this is a hard problem to solve more than adequately with open and more accessible alternatives.
Aside from licensing, usability studies show that serif fonts are more legible than sans serif fonts, so I have no idea where they came up with the idea that somehow they're harder to read for people with disabilities when all prior research I'm aware of has shown the opposite.
Yes! This a thousand times. Many universities I know now discourage sans-serif fonts for screen reasons and prefer Arial because one study showed a slight preference for those who were dyslexic. The evidence is far from strong [1] and frankly I feel like doing a meta-analysis of it in my spare time. I really, really, really dislike Arial and find it harder to read than others.
[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=dyslexia%20arial%20font...
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I don't believe that is true anymore, I've seen studies that show that there is little difference between the two.
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I vaguely remember something about there being a difference on printed paper vs screens when it comes to serifs. But also, aren't most aircraft controls labeled in something like Futura? I believe the Apollo program and other aerospace studies decided that was the most legible.
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Apparently the serifs don't work as well on OCR and screen readers.
https://twitter.com/John_Hudson/status/1615486871571935232
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I thought the same thing. Surely it must be a function of the prevalence of these fonts though. In a hypothetical world where 90% of text you read is in sans serif I'd have to imagine that this would tilt the readability study results in sans serif's favor. I wonder if the studies attempt to control for this somehow?
Logistics probably. With out a doubt you know this font is deployed on most systems around the world. It’s maintained by one of the largest companies in the world. And its provenance can be assured.
Now I want to make a custom Times New Roman font with unpredictable ligatures and 0-width vector data so poorly monitored systems create false data when printed in hardcopy.
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It's the default font in MS Office. If the State Department uses Office (and they almost certainly do), then it's an obvious choice.
Yeah, I was wondering if they finally upgraded computers with Win XP and Office 2003 (with default font Times New Roman) to Win 10/11 and Office 2021/Office 365 (with default font Calibri).
Do you think Anthony Blinken knows what a licensed or unlicensed font is?
Do you think that Anthony Blinken came up with the idea of using Calibri?
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I would hope someone who don't know the context or effect of a choice they are making, at the least consults with someone who does? This isn't rocket science to get right.
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I happen to know this because it was a recent crossword puzzle answer, but it's Antony (no "h").
Your average person doing office work already has access to the font. There’s nothing dumb about reading the room
The federal government is Microsoft Word all the way down. The relevant people have no idea what you’re talking about.
Some of us federal scientists use LaTeX! Have to use Word for internal documents (like proposals) that go to management though…
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A shame they didn’t opt for Public Sans, which was designed by the US Web Design System team. Though I see it only supports Latin characters at the moment, which might make it unsuitable for use at State.
https://public-sans.digital.gov
I believe that font is primarily intended for interfaces rather than documents. The design decisions are quite different between those contexts, or that's what I've heard.
I wonder "how many fonts we need". Is there a good, open resource for FOSS fonts, to compare them, and preferably a curation?
I agree with others on here, though. Everything our government does, and produces, from an IT/development perspective which is not a "competitive advantage" (security, etc.) should be open. Why there would be an official directive to choose a non-open font when so many open fonts exist, is beyond me.
political signal by MSFT corporate to the US citizen, we will license you the type you read each day; pay here.
Extended Latin, including Polish, Vietnamese, etc. Useful enough. Thanks for sharing :)
Serif'd fonts are easier to read.
Per TFA they picked a sans font (Calibri) under the mistaken impression that sans serif fonts are easier to read.
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Interesting that the memo claims that sans serif fonts are preferred to serif fonts for screen reader users and people with disabilities. I thought the exact opposite was true. Is there any definitive research on which type of font is more accessible?
"Results showed a small, but significant advantage in response times for words written in a sans serif font."
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20445911.2011.5...
"Sans serif, monospaced and roman font styles significantly improved the reading performance over serif, proportional and italic fonts."
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/2513383.2513447
and here a whole book about that question
https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/53344
Dyslexia associations have recommended Comic Sans as a font that allows for easier reading comprehension. Experts say that opposition to Comic Sans is ableist: https://www.thecut.com/2020/08/the-reason-comic-sans-is-a-pu...
I, for one, think all State Dept cables should henceforth be transmitted in Comic Sans, so as to provide maximum accessibility.
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That last link (the book) is a fantastic literature review, but every chapter basically concludes that despite some results going each way, there is no statistically significant readability difference between sans serif and serif typefaces, whether on paper or on screen, or whether the reader has various disabilities.
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Isn't 'small but significant' quite ironic.
Fascinating, thank you
Sans serif fonts are preferable only on low-resolution displays (this includes 1080p) or at small point sizes, because in this cases the good serif fonts cannot be rendered correctly.
The classic serif fonts cannot be rendered correctly at low DPI not only due to their serifs (which must be enlarged at low resolutions, to avoid their disappearance; this transforms all classic serif typefaces into uglier slab-serif typefaces), but also due to their "contrast", i.e. because they have both thin and thick lines (which are equalized in width at low resolutions, distorting the glyphs). Some of the better modern sans serif typefaces, e.g. Optima, also cannot be rendered correctly at low DPI, due to their variable-width lines.
On high DPI displays, the preference for sans serif or for serif is driven mainly by the familiarity with the tested typefaces, so it is impossible to predict from the results of a half hour test, where the people may see for the first time some typefaces, which of them they would prefer after using them continuously for six months.
“Disabilities” is an extremely wide spectrum, and it’s pointless to try to group people on that scale.
Let me introduce a term to your venacular that will serve you well: 508 compliance.
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Am I being thick, or does a screen reader not care what the font is?
One of our employees is blind, and screen readers (JAWS is what he uses) can be fairly finicky. For a case where you are looking at or editing the document in MS Word it doesn't matter, since if the text is readily accessible it will ignore the font. However, in something like a pdf or image it needs to OCR the text, and certain fonts are easier to read.
I happen to know this because we ended up needing to rework our training documentation, which we supply as pdfs that were exported from Word. The screen reader needs to figure out the order of the text in the pdf, and by default word can end up exporting the text laid out in a way that causes the screen reader to parse the text out of order. There are accessibility options that can resolve this, but we ended up changing the font since that resolved the problem without needing to ensure the correct options were set everytime someone needs to update the training manuals.
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The issue is with OCR. Imagine something that was printed(for being physically signed or filed into a cabinet, for example) and rescanned into an image or PDF. Both printing and scanning is lossy with lots of noise and artifacts. The article is saying that serif fonts are harder to OCR.
For example, something like this https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/6945...
I wouldn't expect it would make a difference either, but the memo made this claim
I find any document written in serif feels more professional and well considered. As a result, when I look at older documents, it seems that the past had higher standards for content and presentation.
Seeing a Calibri memo from the state department would make me think that it’s illegitimate.
I am absolutely convinced that the past had higher standards for content and presentation. The choice of font faces probably is just a consequence.
It's weird because we have far better and more convenient tools for content and presentation now, but we're so lazy that we make poor use of them and so the output is worse.
Calibri is Microsoft-encumbered, no? Shame they didn't use a free font like Liberation Sans.
What you see as "Microsoft-encumbered," they may see as "default font in Outlook so just go with the font that'll get used anyway."
Liberation Sans would be so on brand for the USA too
Mot à mot translation: "Liberation Without" or "Liberation Lacking"
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The Microsoft empire is bigger than several nation states.
IBM research used to examine UX. The IBM top brass deciding to pay over $35B+ for a UNIX-like when they have an authentic UNIX of their very own which is going to a boneyard in India suggests that kind of UX research isn't front of mind and funded to decide which font is best.
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Not for the bureaucrats at the state department.
They'd have to install that font to every machine, and Calibri is already there.
There are libre fonts with the same metrics as Calibri. Ditto with Arial and Times.
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Eh, better to name the free fonts something that doesn't give an "I can't afford the name brand" vibe. Nothing about freedom even needs to be in the name. To most people, all fonts are already free cause they cost nothing.
Microsoft is a domestic company. That's probably a plus for vendor selection.
Missed opportunity to transition into National Park Typeface! I should build a VS Code theme around this... https://nationalparktypeface.com/
What I want to know is what they were doing before 2004 when they adopted Times New Roman. Courier? Gothic?
Calibri is a nice screen-reading typeface. It is likely that "upstairs" reads on a screen, but I wouldn't bet that much on it.
Times New Roman was designed to shove as many letters into a multi-column newspaper page as possible. It's atrocious for anything else, and should be confined to whence it came, print newspapers. It's only the default because it is the default. Good riddance.
Yeah, Courier (size 12, double-spaced?) because it was very close to typewriters. I can't find a wikipedia source though, so I may be mis-remembering.
I imagine this memo reading like that one in Snow Crash about the inter-office toilet paper sharing system, and employees dutifully reading the memo for exactly X number of minutes to ensure their computer's tracking software notes that they've read the article for the appropriate amount of time.
I've wondered in the past what the cultural influence of font legibility is. I'd imagine someone who grew up reading serif fonts would feel much more comfortable reading a document with a serif typeface than someone like myself who doesn't interact much with serif fonts.
For me serif fonts look kind of off and weird. On the other hand monospaced fonts look strangely beautiful to me so I use monospaced fonts on my blog and in other personal writings. I'm guessing that preference isn't biological though, but more likely due to me spending every day reading and writing code. My brain is just best adapted for working with monospaced fonts.
I think about questions like this often when it comes to UI/UX decisions because I think some modern UI/UX is arguably objectively bad in a world where there only exists subjective users. For example, the qwerty keyboard is god awful, but does it make sense for the next Apple Macbook to ship with a dvorak keyboard layout to fix querty's UX issues? Probably not.
> someone who grew up reading serif fonts would feel much more comfortable reading a document with a serif typeface than someone like myself who doesn't interact much with serif fonts
I grew up reading books, so I suppose I count as someone who grew up reading serif fonts. I find sans serif fonts to be incredibly difficult to read. They only are a win for small on-screen text since there aren't enough pixels for serifs. I have a sans-serif font for my window titles. Reading more than a single paragraph in sans is fatiguing to me.
Now if we can get the Chinese factories to replace the nasty old serif font they use for every label…
I'm guessing it's because those were the shapes that were delivered for the Latin characters in one of the earliest CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) fonts, the MingLiU: https://www.pickafont.com/fonts/MingLiU.html
I guess us westerners see it a lot because it was much simpler for the manufacturers to just use 1 font file for all the different locales of the gadgets (either the cheapo MP3-player, or the label printer).
It was even there on Windows 3.0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CJK_fonts
I always assumed that's Times New Roman.
How are they planning to deal with the I-l issue? Hope that it never comes up?
This is part of why some important government reports still use all caps. It's also a leftover from the telegraph era.
INTELLIGENCE REPORT FOR THE PRESIDENT
STATE DEPARTMENT
SECRET/NOFORN
JANUARY 18 2023
CONTENTS: 1. POLITICAL DEVELOPMENTS WITHIN THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION 2. PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA'S NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROGRAM 3. TURKEY AND NATO
Skeuomorphism is a strong impulse.
Exactly, bIg > lIl
Why are you yelling at me?
My browser renders this in sans serif, but adds serifs to I. I'm on firefox/linux and it's defaulting to the css `sans-serif` and I don't have the energy to research how to find what that defaults to right now.
Dev tools → Inspector panel → Fonts subpanel → Fonts Used, and you can hover over each to see highlighted which glyphs are being rendered in that font.
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Defaults on Firefox are all from DejaVu family: https://dejavu-fonts.github.io/
Mozilla has a custom font for their branding called Zilla Slab, but I believe that's only serif.
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I would imagine that it isn't changing font for the l specifically but just has a sans font that includes a tail on the l. This text box that I'm using, for instance, is Dejavu Sans Mono which does exactly that.
Yes, but this isn't all that helpful with printed documents.
As one of the very few moon dwellers who finds Calibri fucking blinding to read, I hate this. Times New Roman all day every day, or any of Arial/Tahoma/Verdana for sans serif.
I spent probably half an hour figuring out how to make my Google Docs default to Times New Roman for any new docs after. It's a good font. Calibri is trash.
Even worse, a widely-used design doc template here uses a title-only font in the body. I was wondering why it's so hard to read, even for a sans serif font, until I noticed that.
I don't understand the love for Times New Roman honestly. Any type of antiqua is better if you ask me.
In Times New Roman's name, Roman is a reference to the regular or roman style (sometimes also called Antiqua)
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It was the default font in Word for a very long time.
So they are upgrading Microsoft Office from 2003 to 2007?
More like retiring the last gov installation of Office 2003.
What a god-awful choice for a replacement.
I think they are conflating "serif" with "Times" Times is a very narrow font, which has all sorts of readability issues (it's very readable for the space it takes up, but damn it's narrow). I have yet to see an OCR do better on a serif font that has a bit more girth to it. In particular I see things like "III" as being impossible to read for both OCRs, and (in the absence of context) humans in sans-serif fonts.
I'd put up a nice sans typeface with single-storey "g" (the double-storey "g" is hard to read for a lot more people than one might think) against a sans-serif any day.
Th.. that announcement is in Arial... (Edit: and Helvetica)
Looks more like Helvetica. For example, look at the leg on the capital R.
Ah, yes. It's actually both - the subject at the top is Arial, but the body is Helvetica.
Hmm. Are serif fonts beginning to die out altogether, actually? I definitely feel like I see a lot more sans serif than I used to.
I think design trends ebb and flow. We're currently in a period of strong minimalism. But sooner or later some designers will start using serif typefaces in order to stand out and the trend will reverse.
The last decade was strongly minimalist in terms of design, while this one is showing the opposite direction in many ways.
Although my brain thinks any serif font document as more “legitimate”, I can’t think of any reason to use serif in a world of such high resolution screens and printers.
I think you got that backwards. The reason why sans serif fonts became popular is because computer displays are low resolution. Before that, they were often used for ads because they were deemed eccentric. On a modern, high resolution display with hundreds of DPIs you can have all the serifs you want.
Not everyone has a high resolution screen and printer, and it is still important to communicate to those who cannot afford them.
Additionally, I find it hard to discern the difference between 0 and O and I, 1, and l in many sans serif fonts (although the same can be said for some serif fonts).
I see them mostly as display fonts.
To be fair, isn't basically any font better than Times?
Wasn't the whole point of Times to be legible when printed at super high speed with super cheap ink on super crappy newsprint?
If you want maximum legibility, would the solution not be a variant of Century Schoolbook which was explicitly designed to be legible?
You are right. Times Roman was not originally intended to look how it does when printed now. Originally, the thin lines spread and the pointed serifs contracted so the result looked somewhat like Century. You can see examples of this in technical books published in the 1950s-60s.
I absolutely hate Calibri. I hate that Microsoft made it the default font and now we're all left with this quirky, unbalanced font as the default.
But have they relaxed their policy on Comic Sans[1] since Condoleezza Rice's tenure? ;-)
https://achewood.com/index.php?date=07052007
Just waiting for this directive to replace last week's gas stove fauxsteria.
What a case study in the critical importance of sensible defaults, that they could end up enforced as State Department policy.
I’d prefer an Old English font on parchment.
Boeing uses inches. Not feet, just inches. The drafting scales (rulers) we used were in inches, but divided into tenths and hundredths of an inch. The ball bearing catalog what in inches, but rather strange values, which turned out to be mm translated to inches.
I had a hard time recently trying to find a scale in inches and tenths and hundredths. It's just easier to user. I'm kinda sorry I sold my drafting equipment.
Calibri was designed for low-res screens [1]. "De Groot created Calibri in the early 2000s, as part of a collection of fonts for enhanced screen reading. “I designed it in quite a hurry,” he says."
Even Microsoft is moving on from Calibri!
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/calibri-default-font-microsoft-m...
14 point? Does Blinken need glasses? (ignoring the obvious double entendre there).
Soon enough fonts will be an anachronism. We won't read things serially, we will download information into our brains via cyberneural uploads. Then we can get rid of the dead trees and petrochemicals.
Musk says it's only 5-10 years away.
/s
Sans-serif type for printed documents?
this is a 'diplomatic signal' gesture as a demonstration of political power by MSFT
Comic Sans FTW.
Of course blame "the millennials".
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I feel like they don’t have enough work to do if they’re worried about fonts.
Maybe time to trim some fat?
For sure, why improve anything.
Maybe because nobody checked to see if it wasn't a downgrade instead.