Comment by dsevil
4 days ago
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.
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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).
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> 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?
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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.
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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.