Little Marco Rubio has taken decisive action and ended an oppressive policy.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday ordered diplomats to return to using Times New Roman font in official communications, calling his predecessor Antony Blinken’s decision to adopt Calibri a “wasteful” diversity move, according to an internal department cable seen by Reuters.
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 because it did not have the decorative angular features and was the default in Microsoft products.
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“To restore decorum and professionalism to the Department’s written work products and abolish yet another wasteful DEIA program, the Department is returning to Times New Roman as its standard typeface,” the cable said.
Yay! I feel lighter and freer already — Calibri is a woke font, after all.
Unfortunately, Calibri is a Microsoft font that isn’t automatically installed on Mac systems, so I guess I won’t be sending any diplomatic messages in the near future.
To me, Times New Roman is more of a fatty font.
I thought we wanted to get rid of the fatsos.
Obligatory Comic Sans reference.
I have Calibri on my Mac, and have had for years. Perhaps that’s because I’ve had Microsoft Word and Excel installed on my Macs for years…business you know. I’m not really sure when I first got them. It’s been 41 years since I first started using Macs doing Mac software testing for Apple. I believe we used Microsoft Excel to track bug reports on a Mac at some point in there.
The publisher department of our organization with decades of experience in the field, knows that for many people with less than perfect eyesight and as has been used as the most readable for decades, serif fonts (not necessarily times new roman) are easier to read in long written passages. Also, though this comment will be in a serif font, sans serif fonts often make it difficult to discern the difference among small ‘l’, numeral one ‘1’ and a capital ‘I’ without a clear context included.
Yeah, I know how to get calibri — just download the microsoft office installer, then extract the font resources from that. I’m just not interested in that particular font.
Good. Easier for real countries to detect at a glance that any “official” documents put out by the offices of pustulating Rubio contain nothing but shit.
I only pay attention to government missives in Monotype Corsiva. No other font commands my assent.
For years, the big battle in publishing has been serif versus san serif fonts. My eyes aren’t as good as they used to be but I still prefer san serif…which is what I’m using right now to edit this message. I find san serif easier to read. In any car, it’s been demonstrated repeatedly that people don’t read by identifying individual letters except the first and last one. All reading is by context.
Inquiring minds want to know: If they’re redoing their templates, who got that contract? And if they’re republishing their comms, who got that contract?
Perhaps someone should complain to Don Dong, Hexshit, Marco, and the gang that serif fonts are kind of girlie with all those frilly bits.
I did look, and most studies show fuck-all difference. Nothing really recent, but.
However, this commercial site does take a stance: https://www.teachingvisuallyimpaired.com/font-legibility.html
(Sorry, shermanj, but the opposite conclusion to yours)
Me, I do think font (typeface) size matters more than the style, so long as it’s not over-elaborate.
I find it absurd that such an ordinary typeface can be considered “wasteful.” If it was say, Jokerman, then I’d be worried over ink being used in printouts within a large organization.
Both Times New Roman and Calibri are licensed fonts. It would be better to switch to something free.
Since computers are not going away, and might be running things soon, a modern font with clear distinction between numeral zero and upper case ‘O’, between upper case ‘I’ and lower case ‘l’ and numeral ‘1’ would be a good idea. A large government adopting good fonts would help drive its adoption in the wider world.