Good question, with a little searching I found that, in true DOGE fashion, there exists an executive order announcing a new "National Design Studio" which is tasked with updating USWDS

So why fonts are being managed by Rubio and not the Chief Design Officer is anyone's guess

https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/08/fact-sheet-pr...

I think the whole US is being DOGED out of existence tbh.

It's really not. The used font just doesn't move the needle regarding the global impression. 99% of people never ever think or care about the font they use.

What else should be decided on on the highest level: spacing, padding, allowance of the Oxford comma?

It is useful that somebody thinks about that stuff, just not the highest level of the government.

That's like the CEO of Microsoft having meeting about coding conventions, space vs tabs, variable name format etc.

You want to know what the global impression of the US is right now? Here's a translated quote from a newspaper today, from a source in our military:

> – The US has the most qualified intelligence organizations in the world at its disposal. Both the CIA and the FBI have been politicized under the current regime. I find it difficult to see how we will be able to maintain the trusting cooperation we have had with the US in the past after this.

The actions of the current administration speaks far louder than any font ever could, and it's tearing down decades of good will and trust.

The Global impression of the US is down the toilet. This only adds to that. I kept being told that I was not American, and America didn't care what the rest of the world thought. Which is it?

Speaking as someone who is not from the US I can say that the global impression of the US is not helped by the secretary of state bikeshedding about fonts. There are important issues of foreign affairs that need thought and attention at this time.

It's an interesting thought, given what current global impressions are.

I'm imagining a scenario in which the President of the United States is doing his usual sort of diplomatic outreach, consisting of waffling incoherently about things he's heard on TV that he doesn't like about their country. At one point he loses his train of thought and starts bragging about how well he's doing in cognitive adequacy tests. The diplomats are waiting until the bit where they get to flatter and bribe him at the end, the bit where he usually reverses his foreign policy, so long as they can get him to understand what they're actually asking from him. One of them speculates whether it's even possible that half the country is actually dumber than this guy.

A staffer wearing a MAGA baseball cap sidles up to them with some briefing notes. And its just impossible not to notice the notes are typeset in the very same venerable font that was once used as the default for Windows 9x.

The diplomats are stunned. No sans serif wokeness here. The typeface exudes heritage and gravitas. At last they realize what a very serious adminstration they're dealing with.

No one cares about the font US documents are written in. You're not that important.

I disabled fonts on the web browser on my computer, in order to avoid that and other problems. I also disabled the display of non-ASCII characters in URLs (which required adding some codes to make it do that; the built-in settings will only work for the domain name and not the rest of the URL), and changed the font used for URLs, which also helps.

Yeah I understand it's an issue other places but I don't think it's actually a significant issue in government documents and forms written in English which is the usecase here. The choice doesn't have to satisfy all requirements it just needs to be a good choice for government writing.

This font can't be promoted enough!

The crossbar of a t is not a serif, but those of the capital I are definitely serifs.

Only on computer screens it is possible to confuse serifs with crossbars, because of the very low resolution, which forces the increase of the width of a serif to 1 pixel, possibly making it as wide as a crossbar.

To convince yourself that capital I has serifs and not crossbars, just look at high-resolution photos of some Roman imperial inscriptions, like that on Trajan's column, which are the gold standard for the design of the capital letters in serif fonts.

Most letters of the Latin script are made of 3 elements, thick lines, thin lines and serifs. The width ratio between the thick lines and the thin lines is called the contrast of the font.

Serif fonts normally have a higher contrast and sans serif fonts not only have no serifs, but they also have no contrast or only a low contrast.

Serifs are even thinner than the thin lines (which include some of the crossbars), except in sans serif fonts (which have no serifs) and slab serifs fonts (where the serifs are as thick as the thin lines).

Both the sans serif and the slab serif fonts are fonts typical for the 19th century after the Napoleonian wars, when they were used mainly for advertising, where they attracted attention due to their anomalous serifs and they also allowed a lower cost by using cheap paper and printing machines, which would not have rendered well the standard serif fonts.

In several programmer fonts, where most characters are sans serif, a few characters are made slab serif, i.e. with serifs that are as thick as a crossbar, with the purpose of distinguishing them clearly from similar characters. Thus capital I is made with thick serifs looking like crossbars, even if that is not the standard capital I shape. The reason is less to distinguish it from l, which should have a low hook even in sans-serif typefaces, but to distinguish it better from vertical bar, which is important in programming languages.

Moreover, because such programmer fonts are fixed-pitch, a few narrow characters have slab serifs that do not exist in variable-pitch fonts, in order to avoid excessive areas of white space between letters. Such slab serifs added for blackening are put at the top of the small i, j and l letters, not only on capital I (but on the small letters the slab serifs are unilateral, not bilateral, like on capital I). Such extra slab serifs on the narrow characters are inherited from the type-writing machines, where they had the purpose to diminish the pressure of the hammer hitting the paper, to avoid making holes in the paper.

Down-modded by an obscurity apologist.

That's the "diversity" they were talking about?? Fucks sake.

Nope, just Kim Jong one (in French).

> 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.

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.

> Capital "i"s without crossbars aren't capital "i"s. They're lower-case Ls. Any font that doesn't recognize this should be rejected.

You have asserted this at least thrice in the past thirty minutes. What makes you feel so strongly about it? "Rejected" for what purpose? Do you understand that you've just trashed Helvetica, to take a famous example?

I don't think you understand how gov spends money lol.

What you think is "next to nothing" will 99% turn into $300 million dollars and 10 years later about $4 billion will have been spent.

And 100% there are people waiting to milk the gov doing this. Maybe you are one of them? In that case...

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.

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.

I cross my sevens!

I'll consider starting to slash my zeros. Seems legit.

It's a ligature in modern English, but it's a proper letter in Anglo-Saxon.

Ligatures or contextual letter variants (such as s being written with a different symbol when it's at the end of a word) are a sin to encode as characters. They should be part of the presentation layer, not the content layer! And don't even get me started on OCR which thinks such things are good to "preserve".