A Brief History of Times New Roman
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The debate around typography in legal documents heats up as commenters discuss the quirks of court-mandated fonts, with some lamenting the outdated requirements and others championing standardization. While some courts still insist on Arial or Bookman Old Style, others have adopted more modern solutions, like the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit's word processing templates. The conversation reveals a tension between consistency and personal preference, with some imagining a future where lawyers and judges can work with their own styling, as long as the documents are easily referenceable. As one commenter muses, a universal font like Matthew Butterick's "Equity" is a beautiful solution, but the reality is that different courts have different format preferences.
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One would think that by now we'd have a way to draft and file litigation papers in plain text, perhaps with some light markup, and then the courts could automatically generate cover pages, case styles, and tables of contents and authorities; each judge could apply his own preferred styling to it (like a LaTeX class file); and the courts could make the official document available to the public in html and pdf versions in whatever typesetting they deem appropriate. (Even better if the public could choose the format — CSS, perhaps.)
Instead we have ever-shifting rules and standards for compliance, which vary by jurisdiction, and which waste inestimable time, energy, and expense for rules committees, lawyers, administrative staff, printers, and, of course, clients.
The Eighth Circuit gets really into this, publishing a typography guide for lawyers: https://federalcourt.press/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Eighth...
Judges, particularly appellate judges, spend a lot of their time reading briefs. So, as you can see, some of them have strong opinions about brief typography. (Judges, as a group, have strong opinions about lots of things).
That is a lot of reading. Depending on how long an 'argument session' is, retaining the detail must be a challenge.
imagine going to court and the judge has mandated that all documents be prepared using 18pt Jokerman[0], or that all headings must use Bleeding Cowboys[1].
For instance, I would like 12-pt with ~1.2 line spacing, something akin to Tufte — so I have a nice wide margin to make notes and summaries.
I don’t even mind that he’s writing this in his capacity as a fontmonger: if all SEO-type writing were at this level of quality, I’d be much less grumpy about it.
[0] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/21-869_87ad.pdf
[1] https://typographyforlawyers.com/court-opinions.html
It kind of makes sense to ensure that everyone is seeing the same thing, though, which is something PDF is (relatively) good at.
Which is pretty funny because he's one of the typographers that is best known for his actual typography, ie information about arranging text on a plane, vs twiddling with letter design which is what most people think of with typography.
It should be mentioned that the x-height is much higher than the usual Times New Roman, which is usually a good thing imo, but different.
It starts with the origins of TNR. Then it basically says it's a decent font with no real problems. Then it talks about how it's popular because it's the default.
Then in the last paragraph it takes a hard stance that you should not use TNR unless required. It even implores the reader with a bold "please stop". It makes no arguments to support this stance and offers no alternatives.
I agree that he's a bit too mean to mainstream fonts, though.
> Objectively, there’s nothing wrong with Times New Roman. It was designed for a newspaper, so it’s a bit narrower than most text fonts—especially the bold style. (Newspapers prefer narrow fonts because they fit more text per line.) The italic is mediocre. But those aren’t fatal flaws. Times New Roman is a workhorse font that’s been successful for a reason.
It says that there are problems. They're just not fatal.
> It even implores the reader with a bold "please stop". It makes no arguments to support this stance and offers no alternatives.
It says that there are plenty of alternatives (it specifically mentions Helvetica) that are better than Times New Roman. The argument is that Times New Roman is okay, but that it has flaws, and that there are easily available fonts that are superior. If someone is devoted enough to fonts to write a blog about them, then the existence of superior alternatives is enough of a reason to not use a font.
Helvetica is used as an example of a font which garners more "affection" in contrast to TNR, but is never praised by the author or recommended as an alternative - at least not in the linked passage.
My personal bias aside, in terms of a typeface itself, it's ok, but it feels like there have always been a number of alternatives that are stylistically better or more readable.
But as with anything in type, it just depends on what personality/style you're wanting to convey with it.
I read HN articles about some company being shaken down for using an unlicensed font on their website, draconic font licensing agreements, paying per page impression for fonts. And I do not understand why anyone would even bother specifying a non-standard font that requires a license and payment for their website. None of your customers are going to care one bit either way. Except perhaps for the 0.000001% of the population that care about fonts. But even those, are they going to say "I'm not going to order my RAM from you, because you have a bad font on your site?" That seems unlikely. If using some non-free font costs even $1, or takes even 1 minute of your time, it's already a losing proposition.
What's even more strange is reading strong opinions on how great Helvetica is, or how terrible Arial is ("Microsoft bad", I know.) They're the same thing! I guess I'm too dumb to notice the subtle notes of citrus and leather in the kerning, the sublime genius of the hinting.
I should say as well that I've spent a fair bit of time in Asia and, to my Western eyes, a lot of conference materials look amateurish and make my eyes bleed. Maybe it doesn't matter much at the end of the day but I think it does at some level.
This, like almost all writing about fonts, is bewildering to me. It just doesn't matter. For me, there are just 3 text editors in the world: IDE's, terminal editors, and weird editors (Ed, Teco, etc.)
What's even more strange is reading strong opinions on how great Emacs is, or how terrible NeoVim is ("Gnu good Apache bad", I know.) They're the same thing! I guess I'm too dumb to notice the subtle differences between Lisp and Lua.
I get where you're coming from, but the analogy sort of breaks down here - those of us who work with text editors all the time love our tool of choice because it has features that make our lives easier. I can't see how a font could have or lack a "feature".
Oh boy. Everything about a typeface is a feature, and many of them are functional and not just stylistic choices.
- Monospace glyphs are a feature almost everyone here is familiar with and appreciates.
- Serifs are a feature for readability
- Open apertures like in humanist fonts are more readable
- Closed apertures in grotesque fonts make the text more dense
- Stroke contrast
- X-height
- Variety of weights
- Ligatures
- Dotted or slashed zero to distinguish it from capital O
- Features to distinguish capital I and lowercase l glyphs
...these are all features of a typeface.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_typographic_features
https://www.brailleinstitute.org/freefont/
I never see people using it because it's a weird hybrid between serif and sans serif, breaking many traditional design rules.
I wouldn't say it is so much that the population doesn't care about fonts, more a case of them interacting with them in ways they don't notice consciously. The fonts on packaging affect the public perception of a product (and whether they buy them). Other fonts can hint at something being more modern or more traditional.
https://archive.org/details/gri_33125007673623
As someone who is not a design snob (i tend to fall into the ontology snob bucket) the bit I liked is the way the types were categorized, there is the roman style and the egyptian style. And while roman was obvious "Ah yes like times new roman" egyptian was not familiar to me. Easy enough to figure out that it is was today we call sans-serif but I wonder when the term fell out of use?
> master sign-painter James Callingham writes in his textbook "Sign Writing and Glass Embossing" (1871) that "What one calls San-serif, another describes as grotesque; what is generally known as Egyptian, is some times called Antique, though it is difficult to say why, seeing that the letters so designated do not date farther back than the close of the last century. Egyptian is perhaps as good a term as could be given to the letters bearing that name, the blocks being characteristic of the Egyptian style of architecture. These letters were first used by sign-writers at the close of the last century, and were not introduced in printing till about twenty years later. Sign-writers were content to call them "block letters," and they are sometimes so-called at the present day; but on their being taken in hand by the type founders, they were appropriately named Egyptian. The credit of having introduced the ordinary square or san-serif letters also belongs to the sign-writer, by whom they were employed half a century before the type founder gave them his attention, which was about the year 1810."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sans-serif#cite_note-58
A lot of those things are defined by timing and the space between moments that aren't exactly fully rational. And, if they're doing it well, they make you feel something, even if you can't describe exactly how they're doing it.
A "beautiful" font is like that. The font itself is not beautiful on its own, imo; it's raw material. The beauty comes out in how it's used, when you can look at A or B completed thing and say, oh yeah, B feels "better," but I don't know exactly why. It's not just because of the font, but the font 100% matters.
The name of the typeface really is Times New Roman. The roman variant is called Times New Roman Regular and the italic, Times New Roman Italic (which I agree is awkward).
The reason for this is trademarks: "Times" was a registered trademark of Linotype and so when Monotype developed a similar typeface, they used and trademarked "Times New Roman."
Some time ago, I forget when, Monotype acquired Linotype and so is now the holder of both trademarks.
Don't know if Butterick's article mentions this or not. I've read it but not recently.
The metal punches were then created jointly by Linotype and Monotype, which each sold these under different names (and registered trademarks), Times by Linotype and Times New Roman by Monotype.
https://www.nypl.org/blog/2014/12/09/times-new-roman
It captures the beauty of old style and transitional types like Garamond and Baskerville, without demanding the aristocratic luxury of space that these older fonts demanded, and without their stylistic pretensions. It's compact and has a high x-height. It's everyday; it doesn't connote literary snobbishness or state authority; it's the font of presses and shares its dignity with the everyday people who use it.
This excerpt's thesis seems to be that using a common font shows you don't care about your typography. This is true to some extent, but you can show you care while still making the excellent choice of Times by, e.g., using optical variants for titles, footnotes, and call numbers, and for God's sake turning on the fi ligature in Microsoft Word.
Mr. Butterick's fonts are also beautiful, but there's no need to shit on Times New Roman to sell them.
Shame the author doesn't know rhe difference between typeface and font.