A Brief History of Times New Roman

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

> 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.