Rubio Stages Font Coup: Times New Roman Ousts Calibri
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The font drama is real: Marco Rubio has scrapped Calibri for Times New Roman in official documents, sparking a frenzy of ridicule and commentary. Commenters are having a field day, with some likening the move to the absurdity of "Idiocracy" or Mike Judge's satire, while others point out that the change was actually initiated by Antony Blinken during the Biden administration. As one commenter quipped, "If you would bother to read the article instead of suffering from TDS [Trump Derangement Syndrome]," the story behind the font switch is more nuanced than it initially seems. The thread is abuzz with wry observations about the Trump administration's priorities and personnel, with many commenters riffing on the perceived superficiality of its appointees.
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Is Trump incapable of hiring anyone borderline competent?
- Trump: The Apprentice
- Defense: Hegseth: Fox News
- Transportation: Sean Duffy: Real World / Road Rules
- Education: Linda McMahon: WWE (yes, wrestling)
... I don't feel like going any further, it's too depressing.
Lots of articles about this; here's a random one: https://deadline.com/gallery/fox-news-personalities-trump-wh...
McMahon on the other hand was founder and president of WWE
While I agree changing fonts is silly, the blame is totally on Biden admin. Now would you, being a person of integrity as I am sure you are, recall your blame on Trump and put the same blame on Biden?
Literally all of these can impact the answer.
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.
What.
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.
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.
Now! Everything in Fraktur! HH.
Secretary Antony Blinken on NPR's Wait Wait...Don’t Tell Me! About the U.S. Department of State moving from Times New Roman to Calibri.
> 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.
https://blog.scottlogic.com/2012/07/05/the-higgs-boson-comic...
"It’s like they spent $300 million on the movie, and then.. They just used Papyrus."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8PdffUfoF0 from 2024
- Kanye West
Firstly, I thought sans-serif typefaces were encouraged for digital media because they read better than serif fonts. But now the high pixel density displays
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!"
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.
... and libressl. https://web.archive.org/web/20140625075722/http://www.libres... (and the talk - https://youtu.be/GnBbhXBDmwU?si=gMlhb2Xis5V8sR6K&t=2939 )
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
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.
I have only bad memories of using it since I directly associate it with endless formatting fixes for my diploma and course works.
Otherwise, seems kinda benign and random.
And changing it back to Times New Roman isn't wasteful?
There's this rhetorical trick that goes something like "we changed something because we wanted our thing to be the thing, now our thing is the institutionally-defined normal/default thing, if you want to change it back to what it was before you're weird/wasterful/literally Hitler".
Plenty of people are no longer interested in any version of this game.
The justification here is petty and wasteful on its face.
HN should rejoice in the US gov using a font that is open and truly cross platform.
But there are open-source metrically-compatible alternatives to all of them, commonly included in Linux distributions and/or office suites like LibreOffice.
Probably the most popular set is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croscore_fonts, with Tinos, Arimo, Cousine, and in the extended set Carlito and Caladea. The former most popular set is probably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts, with Liberation {Serif, Sans, Mono}.
But a given system is definitely less likely to have a Calibri alternative than a Times New Roman alternative.
I keep both for naming compatibility and also because the 1.0 Liberation versions had truetype hinting (2.0 and up did not).
I don't think it's included by default but the font itself will just work once you install it.
As for open fonts (can fonts even be truly closed in the first place?), Times New Roman is just as closed and proprietary as Calibri is.
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.
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.
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.
Ever tried changing the font of a printed document? Or a PDF?
And I can certainly confirm that changing the font of PDF will almost always result in a unreadable mess. Something about how a PDF doesn't have text "blocks" and instead fixes each character making text reflow almost impossible.
Bifocals, I'm guessing.
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.
* condensed glyph widths, for ease of setting in narrow newspaper columns
* high x-heights and short ascenders and descenders, so lines can be set tighter and more text thus fitted on the page
* robust forms and serifs to allow for the tendency of newsprint to absorb and spread ink
These features don't necessarily translate to improved readability in other contexts.
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.
And it works!
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.
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.”
https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-polit...
Now memory safety sounds too woke, and Trump administration will be moving back to pure C.
Switching from Calibri back to Times New Roman "because DEI" 100% tracks with this administration's spiteful Project 2025 vandalism.
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".
If they want to look like a proper government then the correct answer is monospace and in ALL CAPS just like FAA NOTAMS, obviously.
Terry Gilliam at his most deranged couldn't dream up this nonsense.
If you add up all the government memos, forms, letters, contracts, publications, everything printed globally…
“wow. many serif. so pointy. much ink. such waste!” — Kabosu, probably
Calibri became the State font in Jan 2023.
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.
> window.getComputedStyle(document.querySelector('.entry-content > p')).fontFamily
> '"Instrument Sans", sans-serif'
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.
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).
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