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.
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.
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 think we all can agree that Comic Sans MS reflects the current US government best, both spiritually and aesthetically.
Honestly when are we going to impeach Trump, he's basically the same Hitler. The worst part is he's proud of that comparison as is much of the right. We were headed to a UBI paradise and it all collapsed into billionaire paradise.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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?
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.
> 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.
They haven't. And you really think changing to Calibri benefitted anyone?
_It's an empty gesture at best that they likely then used to pat themselves on the back._
And by the way, if a person is visually impaired, why wouldn't they have tools at their disposal to make things readable? People have been using a variety of tools for years.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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'.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
"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?
> 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.
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)
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).
> 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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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'.
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.
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?
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!
> 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.
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...
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> "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".
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.)
"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.
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 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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> "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.”
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).
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.
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...>
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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."
"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.
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.
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.
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