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
weinzierl 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
vessenes 3 hours ago [-]
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.
watwut 3 hours ago [-]
Calibri is designed for screen use and Times New Roman for printing. As usually, there is a practical option and conservative option.
But stakes are quite low here. Some bureaucrats will have nearly undetectably harder time to read Trump speaches
1970-01-01 3 hours ago [-]
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...
pinkmuffinere 3 hours ago [-]
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.
actionfromafar 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah it was so the occupied peoples could read the edicts better. Sp perhaps not so neutral, after all.
amwet 3 hours ago [-]
“I want a new font so it’s easier to read” isn’t neutral?
actionfromafar 2 hours ago [-]
Not when you are the aggressor in WW2?
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?
irishcoffee 2 hours ago [-]
That isn’t a genuine argument.
Font face != different language + different alphabet.
Font, still a bad argument but technically correct. Font face, nah.
viraptor 2 hours ago [-]
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.
1970-01-01 2 hours ago [-]
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.
loeg 2 hours ago [-]
As they say, "Hitler drank water."
denkmoon 3 hours ago [-]
Fascism relies on politicisation of aesthetic
PaulHoule 3 hours ago [-]
See V is for Vendetta, I would argue there is a sort of seduction in the Baudrillard sense involved.
actionfromafar 3 hours ago [-]
How is that downvoted? You can’t seriously disagree?
renewiltord 3 hours ago [-]
Biden's choice of imposing a font therefore exposes that administration as fascist.
denkmoon 2 hours ago [-]
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.
wtfwhateven 3 hours ago [-]
Nope. That choice wasn't for aesthetic reasons.
4 hours ago [-]
blueflow 4 hours ago [-]
And they still found a way to blame it on the jews.
Nice! Also works with Courier and Comic Sans, but, sadly, not with Helvetica.
cwnyth 24 hours ago [-]
And Arial, Calibri, Georgia, and Cambria. It's missing Linux Libertine fonts, though. So typical.
layer8 2 hours ago [-]
Wingdings would have been nice.
zzo38computer 20 hours ago [-]
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.
jazzyjackson 4 hours ago [-]
> Maybe the government should make up their own
They have, public sans, courtesy of USWDS, and it does distinguish between l and I with a little hook/spur on lowercase el
Come to think of it, I vs l vs 1 vs | is one advantage of serif fonts.
ajross 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
But yes, don't use Calibri in your editor.
MarkusQ 3 hours ago [-]
> Most people tend not to
Except the whole rationale for going to Calibri in the first place was that it was supposedly more accessible due to being easier to OCR.
NewJazz 2 hours ago [-]
That's the "diversity" they were talking about?? Fucks sake.
IshKebab 4 hours ago [-]
> Most people tend not to
Yeah because normal people never have to deal with alphanumeric strings...
dragonwriter 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Ferret7446 1 hours ago [-]
People named Al are having a field day with the recent AI boom.
El confusion is absolutely a problem for regular people.
morshu9001 2 hours ago [-]
Legal language isn't very natural
dragonwriter 2 hours ago [-]
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.
ajross 4 hours ago [-]
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.
HumanOstrich 5 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
gerdesj 2 hours ago [-]
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)
I thought I was the only one that still crossed a seven and slashed a zero. I don’t dot an ‘O’ however.
IggleSniggle 51 minutes ago [-]
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.
FeteCommuniste 57 minutes ago [-]
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.
Jailbird 1 hours ago [-]
I cross my sevens!
I'll consider starting to slash my zeros. Seems legit.
davchana 26 minutes ago [-]
In india its considered bad omen to slash 7s.
thayne 3 hours ago [-]
> calling his predecessor Antony Blinken's decision to adopt Calibri a "wasteful" diversity move
And changing it back to Times New Roman isn't wasteful?
donw 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Jordan-117 2 hours ago [-]
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."
fsckboy 1 hours ago [-]
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?
stickfigure 2 hours ago [-]
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.
ChadNauseam 2 hours ago [-]
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.
UncleOxidant 1 hours ago [-]
There's a new serif in town.
dsevil 1 hours ago [-]
I've seen some comments about how Times New Roman was replaced with something else to improve readability by many.
There's an irony: the _Times_ (of London) commissioned it in 1932 to improve the readability of its newspaper, which previously used a Didone/Modern style typeface.
I like Times New Roman and I find Calibri, a rounded-corner sans serif, to be an absolute abomination of milquetoast typography.
joshuaheard 11 minutes ago [-]
Most federal courts require documents filed there to be in Times New Roman font.
BuyMyBitcoins 4 minutes ago [-]
Moreover, due to executive order the typeface is now called “Times New American”.
loadingcmd 23 hours ago [-]
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!
hightrix 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
seanmcdirmid 3 hours ago [-]
Times New Roman is an old perspective. It’s all part of Trump’s plan to take America back to 1950 and pretend 2050 isn’t coming up.
xdennis 3 hours ago [-]
From the article:
> The department under Blinken in early January 2023 had switched to Calibri
jasonlotito 3 hours ago [-]
Times New Roman existed in 1950. Your comment does not in ANY way contest the parent comment.
morshu9001 3 hours ago [-]
So did sans serif fonts
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3 hours ago [-]
They should bring back mid-Atlantic accents, then there'd be some silver lining to all this bullshit
actionfromafar 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah, we all thought the fascists at least would be stylish when they came.
No, it’s all just fake gold and baseball caps.
iambateman 7 minutes ago [-]
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.
RajBhai 17 hours ago [-]
I have a couple of thoughts about this.
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.
IAmBroom 7 hours ago [-]
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!"
idatum 1 days ago [-]
I love how people are passionate about fonts. Search for the 2017 Saturday Night Live skit with Ryan Gosling "Papyrus". It captures the obsession!
"It’s like they spent $300 million on the movie, and then.. They just used Papyrus."
seba_dos1 1 days ago [-]
Sadly, in this particular case, it's not the font that they are obsessed about.
I have only bad memories of using it since I directly associate it with endless formatting fixes for my diploma and course works.
actionfromafar 3 hours ago [-]
And bad keming. Though, that’s technically not a fault of the font itself.
1 hours ago [-]
WhyOhWhyQ 4 hours ago [-]
Is Calibri actually more accessible? Every step of this story seems pointless and fake.
legitster 4 hours ago [-]
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.
icecube123 35 minutes ago [-]
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.
papercrane 4 hours ago [-]
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.
blueflow 4 hours ago [-]
Link on that, as OCR should be more reliable with Times New Roman due to significant serifs.
orwin 2 hours ago [-]
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)
papercrane 3 hours ago [-]
The memo at the time said the serifs can cause OCR issues.
Just because they claimed it, doesn't make it true. OCR and screen reader software in 2023 did not have problems with serifs.
1 hours ago [-]
sroerick 4 hours ago [-]
This feels more like Microsoft lock-in than anything else. But I don't know how that conspiracy would actually work.
What is involved in changing the font for a government agency?
jimbob45 4 hours ago [-]
Anecdotal but the new default Office font Aptos seems much better than both TNR and Calibri.
ajross 4 hours ago [-]
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.
WhyOhWhyQ 2 hours ago [-]
Interesting. The Wikipedia page for Times New Roman has a pretty fun blurb printed in the newspaper when they first implemented it:
Never before has a font change been so politically divisive.
I’ll personally be taking my votes to supporters of Helvetica next election.
anigbrowl 1 days ago [-]
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'.
Spivak 3 hours ago [-]
Like the choice of typeface is of literally no importance whatsoever but it is also the funniest thing in the world that there is now a DEI font.
> 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.
cafard 11 hours ago [-]
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.]
bsder 3 hours ago [-]
My old eyes really wish more people used something like New Century Schoolbook.
bjoli 21 hours ago [-]
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.
chrismorgan 34 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
eviks 21 hours ago [-]
But you're not spiting anyone, they don't even know about this, just wasting your time compiling a list of a thousand websites
bjoli 21 hours ago [-]
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.
morshu9001 2 hours ago [-]
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
comradesmith 3 hours ago [-]
You can’t separate layout and design from typeface selection.
But yes I agree content must come first. Typeface probably comes second!
Incipient 1 days ago [-]
>Still, I would have gone with Comic Sans.
I don't often genuinely laugh out loud at comments on HN, but that one was good! Subtle, classy, and a gentle yet effective dig.
deafpolygon 17 hours ago [-]
Honestly, I like Comic Sans.
It’s clear, legible and whimsical.
BobbyTables2 22 hours ago [-]
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)
MengerSponge 3 hours ago [-]
> I would have gone with Comic Sans
Funny, I would have gone with Tannenberg
nalnq 1 days ago [-]
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.
Zafira 1 days ago [-]
Aptos has been the default font for Microsoft Word since 2023.
pests 23 hours ago [-]
With all the fanfare made over Calibri back when it was announced, TIL about Aptos
0cf8612b2e1e 3 hours ago [-]
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!!!”
Aptos is slightly wider and taller but looks very very similar to calibri, especially calibri a point larger.
rob74 19 hours ago [-]
So now Times New Roman not only looks uninspired and bland, but also dated? Yeah, I would say that's a good fit...
shadowtree 2 hours ago [-]
Good - Calibri is not open, badly supported on Linux et al.
HN should rejoice in the US gov using a font that is open and truly cross platform.
chrismorgan 39 minutes ago [-]
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.
But a given system is definitely less likely to have a Calibri alternative than a Times New Roman alternative.
ikamm 2 hours ago [-]
Times New Roman is proprietary as well
dsevil 1 hours ago [-]
I think there's clones of it that aren't.
Arodex 42 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, we got it, you hate accessibility and dyslexic people.
simondotau 2 hours ago [-]
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.
1970-01-01 2 hours ago [-]
They should be digitally signed PDFs. It's nearly 2026 and trivial to do.
r0ckarong 18 hours ago [-]
Good thing the world is entirely stable and the United States have literally no more pressing issues.
layer8 2 hours ago [-]
Serifs should improve stability.
elzbardico 1 days ago [-]
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.
bvan 8 minutes 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.
HPsquared 4 hours ago [-]
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.
lateforwork 4 hours ago [-]
> Does anyone else like to change the font on news articles using Inspect Element?
Funnily enough this story, despite extolling the virtues of sans-serif fonts for reading on screens, is typeset in a serif font.
manoDev 1 days ago [-]
Hilarious. It could be a Mike Judge script.
1 days ago [-]
ranger_danger 1 days ago [-]
"Do I look like I know what a jay-peg is?"
soupfordummies 1 days ago [-]
"[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.
What.
QuercusMax 1 days ago [-]
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.
wvbdmp 1 days ago [-]
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.
benterix 17 hours ago [-]
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.
xtiansimon 14 hours ago [-]
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.
Now! Everything in Fraktur! HH.
PaulHoule 3 hours ago [-]
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.
hbogert 11 hours ago [-]
The left and right signalling is such a waste of everyone's time and effort. Reactive pettiness
11 hours ago [-]
miltonlost 4 hours ago [-]
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.
SpicyLemonZest 3 hours ago [-]
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.
estearum 2 hours ago [-]
"Decisions I know nothing about are signaling" is a phenomenally uncurious approach to life.
foldr 2 hours ago [-]
I easily found some research by searching Google scholar:
It's not a big difference, but apparently TNR was the worst of the fonts tested for OCR.
But anyway, there was no "signaling" about the change to Calibri. No-one ever tried to make a political issue out of it the way Rubio is now.
SpicyLemonZest 55 minutes ago [-]
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.
0xbadcafebee 3 hours ago [-]
> 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?
b00ty4breakfast 24 minutes ago [-]
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.
vvpan 4 hours ago [-]
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?
infotainment 4 hours ago [-]
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.
adamhartenz 4 hours ago [-]
You think the US govenment would go for a French typeface?
ben_w 4 hours ago [-]
There's a certain je ne sais quoi to the US government's relationship with France.
Le problème avec les Américains, c'est qu'ils n'ont pas de mot pour «entrepreneur».
weinzierl 4 hours ago [-]
To be fair, they did choose a Roman one - one with proper Italics even.
askew 4 hours ago [-]
A "thank you" for La Liberté éclairant le monde.
publicdebates 4 hours ago [-]
I'm a Kings Caslon kinda guy myself. Partial to those more practical fonts. Can't beat 1800s print, they perfected the art by that point.
Hizonner 23 hours ago [-]
I'm mostly surprised it wasn't Fraktur.
How pitiful do you have to be as Secretary of State to get into minutiae about fonts, anyway?
648373628229 20 hours ago [-]
What's wrong with Fraktur?
maxnoe 19 hours ago [-]
Fraktur is often associated with the German far right, because it's a mostly German thing that nationalists can hang on to.
Funnily enough, it was Goebbels who banned it and required everyone to change to Latin scripts.
tormeh 3 hours ago [-]
Got to hand it to them - Fraktur is an annoying font. It looks cool, though.
SpicyLemonZest 3 hours ago [-]
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.)
unethical_ban 3 hours ago [-]
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.
tpmoney 2 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
watwut 3 hours ago [-]
Except that last guy was not pitiful about and did not had any ideological hateful proclamations.
It was choice for slightly better readability on screens. Plus that font was default in word. There were not emotional claims about it.
It is entirely valid to make fun of Rubio.
rorylawless 3 hours ago [-]
This is approaching Saparmurat Niyazov levels of weirdness.
clickety_clack 1 hours ago [-]
The only non-partisan choice is comic sans.
mitchbob 1 days ago [-]
> 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.
To actually reduce waste, they could have switched to a narrower typeface, such as Roboto Condensed. At least it would save some paper occasionally.
oldsklgdfth 3 hours ago [-]
Slightly tangential, is there any chance this is motivated by profit or someone making money off this?
Otherwise, seems kinda benign and random.
embedding-shape 3 hours ago [-]
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.
rcpt 3 hours ago [-]
It's probably to ensure people keep talking about "woke" which tends to be good for the right.
icecube123 31 minutes ago [-]
Its exactly this. Choosing a font that makes things easier for disabled people, and those with limited sight is far too “woke” for 2025.
ggm 1 days ago [-]
But you [sometimes] still have to use courier filing in the courts?
dragonwriter 1 days ago [-]
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.)
CaliforniaKarl 1 days ago [-]
You follow the style guide or rules for the court in which you are filing. The US Supreme Court, for example, does not use Courier.
IAmBroom 7 hours ago [-]
Pretty soon they'll only accept crayon.
mhd 4 hours ago [-]
Don't a lot of courts use/mandate Century? Just use that. Better than TNR. If you can't afford a custom font…
hs586 4 hours ago [-]
I just realized that if you google the font (e.g. "Calibri font"), you get the search results in that font. Neat!
_bohm 4 hours ago [-]
Works for lots of other fonts too :)
seydor 5 hours ago [-]
Does that mean there will be a Times Caesar , a Times Lady , a Times Mistress and Universal Times new Rome Time? What a Time to be alive
itsjustjordan 4 hours ago [-]
Slightly related but today I learned if you Google a font the site changes to that font.
Havoc 4 hours ago [-]
US has genuinely lost it
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
rootusrootus 37 seconds ago [-]
[delayed]
legitster 4 hours ago [-]
> "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".
gravy 4 hours ago [-]
Didn't I read somewhere that serif fonts are better for dyslexia
morshu9001 3 hours ago [-]
Wasn't there was a previous "coup" that changed it from TNR to Calibri? TNR is nicer though.
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.
BLKNSLVR 3 hours ago [-]
The princess and the pea.
SpaceManNabs 2 hours ago [-]
This is silly as Montserrat is the only true choice.
Terretta 21 hours ago [-]
This change sounds like that "waste, fraud, and abuse" stuff.
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
techblueberry 1 days ago [-]
What was wasted?
bigtones 1 days ago [-]
I had to check this was actually Reuters and not The Onion. eye roll
dgeiser13 3 hours ago [-]
The ole DEIA font.
rat87 2 hours ago [-]
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).
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.
whoisthemachine 1 days ago [-]
Compare 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.
jgalt212 24 hours ago [-]
> 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.
stego-tech 3 hours ago [-]
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.
bakies 4 hours ago [-]
This admin does like Roman stuff- like their salute
int0x29 4 hours ago [-]
Ah yes Calibri is now "DEI". Rubio don't you have a real job?
4 hours ago [-]
throwacct 4 hours ago [-]
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.
jazzyjackson 3 hours ago [-]
The story is that people with better things to do are spending their time on this
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...>
gowld 8 hours ago [-]
Calibri was the default MS Word from 2007 until July 2023, when Aptos took over.
Calibri became the State font in Jan 2023.
sombragris 9 hours ago [-]
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.
khazhoux 2 hours ago [-]
> "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.”
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.
thesagan 3 hours ago [-]
Once again Garamond is passed over. I truly live in dark times.
gjvc 1 hours ago [-]
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.
A Sancerre with a long, sweet finish.
chuckadams 1 days ago [-]
Apparently sans-serif is "woke" or something. Cleek's Law meets Poe's.
xrd 3 hours ago [-]
I for one am grateful someone is finally standing up to these lunatic radical typographers and their diversity, equity and italics tyranny.
SanjayMehta 1 days ago [-]
His boss' posts on Truth Social should be in Comic Sans.
Gualdrapo 1 days ago [-]
Just remember that when the CERN announced they finally could prove the existence of the Higgs boson, they did it using Comic Sans
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.
greenhearth 10 hours ago [-]
"TDS" is not a real thing, you clown. Grow up.
jesterson 2 hours ago [-]
Your funny comment does prove it's existence. Lack of intelligence stops you from seeing the obvious.
anigbrowl 1 hours ago [-]
...says the person who hasn't mastered basic grammar.
jesterson 42 minutes ago [-]
You must be proud of mastering the grammar, aren't you? I guess there is nothing else to be proud of.
anigbrowl 36 minutes ago [-]
If you are going to make snide comments about the intelligence of others, be prepared for your own to be scrutinized.
cbm-vic-20 10 hours ago [-]
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.
xigoi 10 hours ago [-]
Is there any evidence that sans-serif typefaces are more readable? I’ve previously seen headlines claiming the opposite.
IAmBroom 7 hours ago [-]
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?
Literally all of these can impact the answer.
BobaFloutist 6 hours ago [-]
Ok, now insert "broadly" or "generally" into the previous comment and respond to what they actually meant.
jazzyjackson 3 hours ago [-]
Mixed evidence like they said, it depends
jesterson 2 hours ago [-]
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.
cratermoon 10 hours ago [-]
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?
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.
causal 4 hours ago [-]
Well yeah? It's not about the font, it's about the pettiness of the declared reasons for the reversal
yincrash 4 hours ago [-]
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.
cogman10 4 hours ago [-]
I'm really out of the loop on this.
What virtue is being signaled by who?
I know people get real touchy about fonts, but I have a hard time understanding why this is even a news article.
Eduard 4 hours ago [-]
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.
epolanski 4 hours ago [-]
Because politicians are making political choices on fonts rather than leaving those matters to technicians.
lurk2 4 hours ago [-]
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).
> Mr. Rubio's directive, under the subject line "Return to Tradition: Times New Roman 14-Point Font Required for All Department Paper,"
4 hours ago [-]
blueflow 4 hours ago [-]
No? If signalling led to an decision, the reversal is not automatically signalling based. Calibri is just not a good font.
aprilthird2021 4 hours ago [-]
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
anilakar 4 hours ago [-]
> present a unified, professional voice in all communications
Might want to start by banning tweeting then.
ModernMech 4 hours ago [-]
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."
throw03172019 4 hours ago [-]
I’m surprised this administration did not chose Comic Sans as the default font.
user____name 4 hours ago [-]
Rubio looks more like a Papyrus person.
alamortsubite 4 hours ago [-]
Can Comic Sans do all caps?
Bender 5 hours ago [-]
Perhaps it is time to get traction on "tabs vs spaces". /s
If they want to look like a proper government then the correct answer is monospace and in ALL CAPS just like FAA NOTAMS, obviously.
ebbi 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
youngNed 4 hours ago [-]
But.... and this is important, it's not funny.
"Here is a thing that makes a slight difference, with no cost, to a small percentage of people"
"Nah, woke. Let's make it worse for them."
There is nothing funny about performative cruelty
fnordprefect 4 hours ago [-]
I'm with John Gruber, who is hardly a fan of this administration:
"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.
ebbi 4 hours ago [-]
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"
roughly 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
youngNed 4 hours ago [-]
> they need more than a sans serif typeface,
Agreed.
So... why are the administration going in the opposite direction?
> Official departmental paperwork shouldn't look clownish.
Oh. It's about looking clownish. Right. OK. Pull up a chair, this might take a while, and we will get to typefaces pretty late on, I'll be honest
xanderlewis 4 hours ago [-]
With no cost?
youngNed 3 hours ago [-]
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.
But I'm game if you are?
Jupyter notebooks or excel?
groundzeros2015 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
AshleyGrant 4 hours ago [-]
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.
groundzeros2015 4 hours ago [-]
Is screen readability the only value to consider?
> If you had read the article
Please read the rules.
youngNed 4 hours ago [-]
Performative? The one that you read about. The one that had a press release, the one that had articles on social media that you are commenting on.
Meaningful? The one that looked into which font was more readable, for the most people
groundzeros2015 4 hours ago [-]
Do you have trouble reading Times New Roman? Every computer I used growing up used it in much lower resolution.
roughly 4 hours ago [-]
No, but I’m also not an accessibility expert, so my opinion here’s pretty irrelevant.
the_gastropod 4 hours ago [-]
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.
bena 4 hours ago [-]
This is a performative change.
The change to Calibri was meaningful.
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.
websiteapi 4 hours ago [-]
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.
bravoetch 4 hours ago [-]
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."
But the rest of us just shorten that to "joke".
ebbi 4 hours ago [-]
Thank you - exactly what I meant. I thought it was a common understanding when used in this context.
websiteapi 4 hours ago [-]
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?
3 hours ago [-]
ebbi 4 hours ago [-]
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.
websiteapi 4 hours ago [-]
you and I have very different definitions of joke it seems.
ebbi 4 hours ago [-]
I think you just need to read more. Your comprehension of common terms in context is lacking.
4 hours ago [-]
cluckindan 4 hours ago [-]
Obviously they would take a Venezuelan oil tanker. Oil is the only reason Trump is interested in Venezuela.
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.
ebbi 4 hours ago [-]
what
istillcantcode 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
impure 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
TehCorwiz 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
slater 1 days ago [-]
Stopped clock, twice right?
epolanski 4 hours ago [-]
This feels like dystopia, sane management or administrations should delegate this stuff to experts, not politicians.
We live in the world were everything is now "vibed" really.
Havoc 4 hours ago [-]
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
CodingJeebus 4 hours ago [-]
Read up on the state of the Chinese economy, it’s not a given they’ll be in the drivers seat long term either.
Havoc 3 hours ago [-]
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
A_D_E_P_T 34 minutes ago [-]
> their demographics are shaky AF
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.
Untit1ed 4 hours ago [-]
You certainly won't have to worry about them changing fonts as easily...
SpaceManNabs 2 hours ago [-]
pushing for more literacy at scale is usually a good thing.
this approach is garbage, but i find your second line a bit odd.
it is also funny you bring up china because china changed their entire character system for diversity reasons (less educated people couldn't read).
Rendered at 02:42:50 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
But stakes are quite low here. Some bureaucrats will have nearly undetectably harder time to read Trump speaches
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?
Font face != different language + different alphabet.
Font, still a bad argument but technically correct. Font face, nah.
And just like with the font, that shaped preferences for years.
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.
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.
They have, public sans, courtesy of USWDS, and it does distinguish between l and I with a little hook/spur on lowercase el
https://public-sans.digital.gov/
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Public+Sans?preview.text=1...
The glyph repertoire is a bit limited, though.
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.
But yes, don't use Calibri in your editor.
Except the whole rationale for going to Calibri in the first place was that it was supposedly more accessible due to being easier to OCR.
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.
El confusion is absolutely a problem for regular people.
Not that official State Department communication is mostly “legal language” as distinct from more general formal use of natural language to start with.
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)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligature_(writing)
Same root as "ligament" and "ligand."
I'll consider starting to slash my zeros. Seems legit.
And changing it back to Times New Roman isn't wasteful?
The justification here is petty and wasteful on its face.
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.
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.
> The department under Blinken in early January 2023 had switched to Calibri
No, it’s all just fake gold and baseball caps.
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.
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.
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!"
"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
1. https://youtu.be/jVhlJNJopOQ?si=jq6NsPhnzwCKXFPr
2. https://youtu.be/Q8PdffUfoF0?si=sx8XC0X6oJqJIXmc
I have only bad memories of using it since I directly associate it with endless formatting fixes for my diploma and course works.
Serif fonts have some readability features of their own, specifically for printed word.
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.
https://x.com/John_Hudson/status/1615486871571935232
What is involved in changing the font for a government agency?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_New_Roman?st_source=ai_m...
I’ll personally be taking my votes to supporters of Helvetica next election.
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'.
(https://practicaltypography.com/times-new-roman-alternatives...)
> 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.
And on Calibri:
(https://practicaltypography.com/calibri-alternatives.html)
> 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.
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.]
To spite these people I force the use of Arial on the worst offenders. The list is now a couple of thousand websites long.
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.
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.
But yes I agree content must come first. Typeface probably comes second!
I don't often genuinely laugh out loud at comments on HN, but that one was good! Subtle, classy, and a gentle yet effective dig.
It’s clear, legible and whimsical.
Funny, I would have gone with Tannenberg
If you are a Deep Space 9 fan, this is where you get to scream, “It’s a fake!!!”
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.
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.
Yes, for sites that use unreadably thin fonts, such as https://stratechery.com
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/refont/
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.
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.
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.
https://www.scitepress.org/Papers/2021/109668/109668.pdf
It's not a big difference, but apparently TNR was the worst of the fonts tested for OCR.
But anyway, there was no "signaling" about the change to Calibri. No-one ever tried to make a political issue out of it the way Rubio is now.
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.
Terry Gilliam at his most deranged couldn't dream up this nonsense.
I do wish they’d gone for a classier serif though; Garamond was right there.
How pitiful do you have to be as Secretary of State to get into minutiae about fonts, anyway?
Funnily enough, it was Goebbels who banned it and required everyone to change to Latin scripts.
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.
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.
[1]: https://daringfireball.net/misc/2025/12/state-department-ret...
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.
It was choice for slightly better readability on screens. Plus that font was default in word. There were not emotional claims about it.
It is entirely valid to make fun of Rubio.
https://archive.ph/2025.12.10-001235/https://www.nytimes.com...
Otherwise, seems kinda benign and random.
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
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".
> 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.
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
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).
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.
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.
Calibri became the State font in Jan 2023.
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.
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...
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.
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.
A Sancerre with a long, sweet finish.
https://blog.scottlogic.com/2012/07/05/the-higgs-boson-comic...
And it works!
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.
Edit: I just realized that Duffy is SecTrans because he was on Road Rules.
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
Literally all of these can impact the answer.
<https://web.archive.org/web/20151207071605/http://historywei...>
Now memory safety sounds too woke, and Trump administration will be moving back to pure C.
Times New Roman is being phased out at the State Department, replaced by Calibri
207 points|danso|3 years ago|256 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34427504
What virtue is being signaled by who?
I know people get real touchy about fonts, but I have a hard time understanding why this is even a news article.
https://x.com/John_Hudson/status/1615486871571935232
> 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.
(I didn’t read the article as this is a non-story, but I’m definitely right).
> Mr. Rubio's directive, under the subject line "Return to Tradition: Times New Roman 14-Point Font Required for All Department Paper,"
Might want to start by banning tweeting then.
If they want to look like a proper government then the correct answer is monospace and in ALL CAPS just like FAA NOTAMS, obviously.
"Here is a thing that makes a slight difference, with no cost, to a small percentage of people"
"Nah, woke. Let's make it worse for them."
There is nothing funny about performative cruelty
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/12/10/state-departmen...
"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.
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.
Agreed.
So... why are the administration going in the opposite direction?
> Official departmental paperwork shouldn't look clownish.
Oh. It's about looking clownish. Right. OK. Pull up a chair, this might take a while, and we will get to typefaces pretty late on, I'll be honest
But I'm game if you are?
Jupyter notebooks or excel?
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.
> If you had read the article
Please read the rules.
Meaningful? The one that looked into which font was more readable, for the most people
The change to Calibri was meaningful.
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.
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.
But the rest of us just shorten that to "joke".
Yes, the US government is a laughing stock while we have sympathy for those negatively impacted by the decisions made by these incompetent idiots.
https://intelpoint.co/insights/venezuela-saudi-arabia-and-ir...
We live in the world were everything is now "vibed" really.
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
...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.
this approach is garbage, but i find your second line a bit odd.
it is also funny you bring up china because china changed their entire character system for diversity reasons (less educated people couldn't read).