I think we all can agree that Comic Sans MS reflects the current US government best, both spiritually and aesthetically.

May I ask what your thoughts are on fonts that prioritise legibility over everything else, like Atkinson Hyperlegible? IMHO Calibri has a better balance between legibility and a consistent/polished look. The Munich transportation company MVG wanted to set an example here and adapted this font for their information screens at subway stations, on trains etc. There's one catch though: because Atkinson Hyperlegible tends to have wider glyphs than the previous (also sans serif, of course) font they used, they had to reduce the font size to fit the same amount of information on the screens, so the increased readability is partly counteracted by the decreased font size.

I bet they want to get rid of Calibri because it was designed by a Dutch person. There's only two things I hate in this world, people who are intolerant of other people's cultures... and the Dutch.

(disclaimer: I am Dutch).

>Serif fonts are often perceived as more traditional, but they are also more demanding to use effectively. While a skilled typographer can, in theory, produce excellent results with Times, using it in its default digital form is not considered professional practice.

This reads like your CEO is mixing an argument against serifs with an argument against Times specifically. Later on they make a case against Times' lack of support for more modern features in digital fonts, which is a fine argument, but a question comes to mind: is the solution a sans-serif font?

It seems to me upon reading the article that Rubio's staff, or Rubio himself, is being overly specific with the font and I suspect that, being uninformed, what they really want is a serif font rather than Times New Roman, specifically. Maybe I'm wrong.

In any case, I'd like for you/your CEO to make it clearer, if you will: do you believe official government communications should use a sans-serif font altogether or is it just a problem with Times? Or both?

On a more personal note, is there any serif font you'd suggest as an alternative?

Thank you. (And sorry if I read this wrong.)

> Our studio, LucasFonts, designed Calibri.

Damn, the diversity of people one can meet here on HN continues to amaze me. Even after almost 13 years.

> The decision to abandon Calibri on the grounds of it being a so-called “wasteful diversity font” is both amusing and regrettable.

The cruelty (in this case, against people with visual impairments) is the actual point, as always, and the appearance of "going back to the good old times" is the visual that's being sold to the gullibles.

I love how emphasize is given to accessibility for older adults, such as the orange man. But I guess he gets his printouts with few words and big fonts anyways.

"anything we don't like is 'diversity' [woke]"

How much will it cost to change fonts?

I read the title of this and as I could not wrap my head around the idea of "Rubio" here actually meaning Marco Rubio, I assumed this was a font name, but also laughing to myself just how hilariously absurd it would be for the Secretary of State to involved in picking fonts...only to click the link and discover that yes, it is exactly that absurd.

From the article:

> A cable dated December 9 sent to all U.S. diplomatic posts said that typography shapes the professionalism of an official document and Calibri is informal compared to serif typefaces. > "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.

I don't read that purely as an "anti-woke" move, why did Reuters only highlight that part and not the bit about professionalism? I do indeed agree that serifs look more authoritative.

Calibri is woke?

Tilting at windmills...

> Calibri was supposedly easier to read by people with disabilities

I'd love to know how that was determined. Given that:

"If different fonts are best for different people, you might imagine that the solution to the fonts problem would be a preference setting to allow each user to select the font that’s best for them.

This solution will not work, for two reasons. First, previous research on user-interface customization has found that most users don’t use preference settings, but simply make do with the default.

Second, and worse, users don’t know what’s best for them, so they can’t choose the best font, even if they were given the option to customize their fonts. In this study, participants read 14% faster in their fastest font (314 WPM, on average) compared to their most preferred font (275 WPM, on average)"

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/best-font-for-online-readin...

I would have thought the change to Calibri was simply because office uses it as the default font now

More charitably, the signaling could be: “keep the government as small as possible, but no smaller than that”, i.e. use things that basically mostly work and quit expending resources addressing every edge case, particularly when it’s performative (slight font variations) rather than obvious (a ramp to get into a public building)

by that logic if we help them see why don't we help them understand as well?

I don't think that much thought went into it. The change was initiated by the department's DEIA ("A" for Accessibility) office. Anything that office did was a priority for this administration.

Keep in mind that the transgenic mouse breeding program used to make lab mice for research got defined because the President claimed Democrats were so woke they were funding "trans" mice research.

Half of what they are doing is virtue signalling and posturing without any real understanding of what they are doing.

Nope- times new roman just looks better.

The entire thing literally reads like an Onion piece. If I'd read this exact article in The Onion I would've considered it brilliant comedy.

Spending time on something like this suggests he doesn't actually have much to do besides throwing his power around.

with current timeline expect the unexpected

What do you mean the TIRE company actually reviews restaurants?

> 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

https://public-sans.digital.gov/

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Public+Sans?preview.text=1...

Nothing is more inefficient than the secretary of state thinking about and conducting meetings about the font used in documents. It just doesn't matter in the sense that it "doesn't move the needle".

I expect the leaders of a government deciding on matters that have a real impact on people's live, not on stuff that from a practical point of view is totally irrelevant.

You are right, but if legibility had been the reason for change, Times New Roman is a rather poor choice, even if better than Calibri.

Among Microsoft typefaces, Georgia would have been much better than Times New Roman, especially when read on displays, but even when printed.

There are of course even better choices, but Georgia is a familiar typeface for most people, it is similar enough to Times New Roman and the older versions of Georgia are free to use by anybody.

Georgia is not as condensed as Times New Roman, but here Times New Roman is the anomaly, as it is more condensed than a normal font, for the purpose of fitting within narrow newspaper columns.

From Windows 3.0 to Windows 98, I have used Times New Roman as my main text font in documents, because Windows did not include anything better, but immediately after the introduction of the superior Georgia I replaced Times New Roman with it for some years, until eventually I stopped relying on the bundled typefaces and I have bought some typefaces that I liked more, for use in all my documents. (Windows 3.0 did not have yet TTF fonts, with which the licensed Times New Roman was introduced later, but it already had a metrically equivalent Times font).

True though the confusion about that is largely when you're not dealing with words like passwords or hashes. In the context of words it's going to be generally disambiguated by context, I can't think of an example off hand in writing where I and l will that ambiguous. The removal of serifs probably has a higher impact to more people unless I'm missing some common situation where they'd be easy to confuse in context.

I've always found serif fonts easier to read, although I prefer Baskerville over Times.

Come to think of it, I vs l vs 1 vs | is one advantage of serif fonts.

Yep. Any font that neglects to put crossbars on the capital "i" should be eliminated from consideration for any practical application.

See this policy of return to Times New Roman really works. People are debating particular letters after (both) rulings have been made instead of the fact that president protects pedophiles.

ha ha MAGA font. Only big letters

No. I don’t want the gov wasting money making a fucking font.

There’s a few dozen off the shelf fonts that would work for 99.99% of people.

For those who it doesn’t work, deal with it. It’s a font. Or fallback to system font.

> 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.

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)

US Gov already has an ”official” open source typeface, Public Sans. https://public-sans.digital.gov/

Unfortunately, it’s also intended to be not just accessible, but ”principles-driven”. Can’t have that. (More seriously, it’s probably more appropriate for screens than print)

To be honest, the first moment I saw the page, it did seem to give my eyes a negative reaction, but after reading a few of the results, it started to look fine pretty quickly.

Nice! Also works with Courier and Comic Sans, but, sadly, not with Helvetica.

I think it mostly depends on what we're used to and what our associations are.

Many computer science people I respect are huge typeface nerds, but personally I could never see much value in focusing on it.

It may look better but it's harder to read basically across the board for anyone with difficulty distinguishing letters. Sans serif fonts are easier for people with dyslexia without going all the way to a dyslexia specific font. They're also generally far better for people with all sorts of poor vision.

It really comes down to the fact that it's better to be functional, forms don't need to /look/ good they need to work well. For aesthetic things we can still use the pretty fonts.

There's no irony in that: different medium.

The Dutch dev of Calibri commented on the history [1].

He makes a couple of good points, nuances. The main one I liked is related to your premise: it was that the Times New Roman font was optimized for printing newspapers whereas his successor was meant for computer screens.

Ultimately, IMO this is just bullying people with bad eyesight and dyslexia (and said bullying I can only regard as hatred towards minorities which reminds me of a different era). My father had MS and due to that bad eyesight. He had special glasses with a special lens to read. Of course any font change has a learning curve, but to me this just hits home as I've seen him struggle to read.

[1] https://nos.nl/l/2594021

As others have said, Times New Roman was specifically designed for newspapers:

* condensed glyph widths, for ease of setting in narrow columns

* high x-heights and short ascenders and descenders, so lines can be set tighter and more text thus fitted on the page

* robust forms and serifs to allow for the tendency of newsprint to absorb and spread ink

These features don't necessarily translate to improved readability in other contexts.

Times New Roman was designed for a time when printing quality was not that good. With 1080p screen nowadays, that barrier is removed, so optimization of readability has different constraints.

I found that Calibri looks better than TNR on a low dpi screen. The serifs just make the letters look jagged.

Blinken did change it to Calibri at the recommendation of the diversity and inclusion office. Whether or not it was justified is another matter, but there is no question it was a DEI initiative.

Underrated comment.

> 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.

Gotta get that typeface looking good before the regime change starts.

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.

And bad keming. Though, that’s technically not a fault of the font itself.

I chuckle at the thought mr. Putin was unable to parse some important US document, complained, and mr. Trump's minion promptly fixed the issue!

I’m a professional graphic designer, people in the industry use font, type and typeface interchangeably. No one goes “Umm Actually…” you should also tell that to who wrote css, because font-weight doesn’t make sense if a font is already a specific weight. Words mean something specific until they don’t and the meaning changes over time and that’s okay

> A typeface is the design; a font is its specific instance. This is basic knowledge, taught to children, houseplants, and most domesticated goats.

I didn't know this, and this explanation isn't really helping. (I did know there's a difference between typeface and font, but no idea what).

Why would this be basic knowledge when all most people ever have to deal with is the font options in Word?

In my experience, "font" is the colloquial term referring to either. Programmers get to demand precision, for journalists it's a bit tougher. The de facto meaning of terms does, unfortunately, evolve in sometimes arbitrary ways. And it's tough to fight.

If all DoS documents are prepared with the same software or software suite (e.g. MS Office), isn't that a distinction without much of a difference? They've gone back to using TNR.ttf instead of Calibri.ttf (or whatever the files are actually called).

> Reuters calling the switch a "font" change instead of a typeface change is troubling

Come on, they're writing for a general audience, not a bunch of pedantic typographers and developers.

> a society that now casually refers to all pasta as "spaghetti"

I have never experienced this; in what contexts have you?

> taught to children

We were 100%, never taught this (in the UK).

> A simple correction would stop this spiral

It wouldn't, it would just mean fewer people understood what the story was about.

> This is basic knowledge, taught to children, houseplants, and most domesticated goats.

https://xkcd.com/2501/

Pagani interiors look so plastic and tacky. Why do they make the interior of such beautiful, expensive cars look so cheap?

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!"

(We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46224867. It's fine and interesting, but the offtopicness of you-know-who is a bit too agitating at the top of the thread.)

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...

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.

Fascism relies on politicisation of aesthetic

Sadly, in this particular case, it's not the font that they are obsessed about.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVhlJNJopOQ from 2017

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8PdffUfoF0 from 2024

“Sometimes I get emotional over fonts.”

- Kanye West

yes! the first one^1 is hilarious! the sequel^2 is somehow equally funny.

1. https://youtu.be/jVhlJNJopOQ?si=jq6NsPhnzwCKXFPr

2. https://youtu.be/Q8PdffUfoF0?si=sx8XC0X6oJqJIXmc

My friends and I still reference "Shakira merch" from that sketch

It's incredibly generous to so many future plaintiffs to have this overt hostility to the very concept of accessibility and fairness and put in writing, so many times and in so many ways.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Anecdotal but the new default Office font Aptos seems much better than both TNR and Calibri.

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.

Computer Modern is nice on paper but a bit spindly on screen, IMO: Knuth's other serif font, Concrete Roman, works better for that.

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.]

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.

In the context of documents, the lack of font choice regarding Times New Roman could be partly attributed to the fact that it was the default font on Microsoft Word until 2007. The irony is, of course, that it was replaced by none other than Calibri.

>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.

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)

> I would have gone with Comic Sans

Funny, I would have gone with Tannenberg

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.

Maybe not, but the BBC's use (and subsequent dropping) of Gill Sans comes close!

Helvetica is great for signage, but in my opinion it isn't great for longer texts.

Georgia, Palantino, Bookerly. Those are high quality serif fonts which suits every occasion.

Serifs should improve stability.

Was the world stable in 2023 when the font change occured?

"Do I look like I know what a jay-peg is?"

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.

> Does anyone else like to change the font on news articles using Inspect Element?

Yes, for sites that use unreadably thin fonts, such as https://stratechery.com

i change it with refont

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/refont/

Funnily enough this story, despite extolling the virtues of sans-serif fonts for reading on screens, is typeset in a serif font.

Not exactly related, but this is also the government that keeps insisting that the tariffs are paid by the foreign exporters (now that's a BS justification by any government that warrants widespread panic). It's all about narratives. I wouldn't bother much with fact checking them.

Read up on the state of the Chinese economy, it’s not a given they’ll be in the drivers seat long term either.

You certainly won't have to worry about them changing fonts as easily...

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).

Explicit christian origin sounds like Jesus himself designed the font. But no, it's only the label the institute gave itself.

By that measure, I could create a font with explicit godly origin, because I see myself as a direct descendant of God.

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.

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.

Times New Roman is proprietary as well

Calibri works just fine on my machine. Just download the font using one of the many font packages available in your distro (i.e. https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ttf-ms-win11)

I don't think it's included by default but the font itself will just work once you install it.

As for open fonts (can fonts even be truly closed in the first place?), Times New Roman is just as closed and proprietary as Calibri is.

Yeah, we got it, you hate accessibility and dyslexic people.

They should be digitally signed PDFs. It's nearly 2026 and trivial to do.

You think the US govenment would go for a French typeface?

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.

Moreover, due to executive order the typeface is now called “Times New American”.

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.