Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/rubio-stages-font-coup-times-new-roman-ousts-calibri-2025-12-09/

by italophil • 8 months ago

407 623 8 months ago

reuters.com

https://archive.md/x0Sxc

manoDev2• 7 months ago

Hilarious. It could be a Mike Judge script.

ranger_danger2• 7 months ago

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

rsynnott• 7 months ago

This is Michael Scott levels of managerial nonsense, bloody hell.

Is Trump incapable of hiring anyone borderline competent?

QuercusMax4• 7 months ago

The only thing these morons understand are surface level appearances. That's why we have so many TV people.

- 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.

butvacuum• 7 months ago

Dear Lord... I'd not picked up on this- if true (I need to validate it for myself).

manoDev2• 7 months ago

The "Idiocracy" movie is now a documentary from the future.

jazzyjackson6• 7 months ago

I don't know that being a contestant in a couple of reality tv shows in college makes Sean Duffy a TV person

McMahon on the other hand was founder and president of WWE

slater• 7 months ago

Stopped clock, twice right?

soupfordummies• 7 months 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.

QuercusMax4• 7 months 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• 7 months 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.

xtiansimon• 7 months 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.

bigtones• 7 months ago

I had to check this was actually Reuters and not The Onion. eye roll

chuckadams• 7 months ago

Apparently sans-serif is "woke" or something. Cleek's Law meets Poe's.

ggm• 7 months ago

But you [sometimes] still have to use courier filing in the courts?

CaliforniaKarl• 7 months 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.

IAmBroom2• 7 months ago

Pretty soon they'll only accept crayon.

dragonwriter6• 7 months 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.)

techblueberry• 7 months ago

What was wasted?

ranger_danger2• 7 months ago

https://2021-2025.state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-on-np...

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• 7 months ago

Compare this:

calling his predecessor Antony Blinken's decision to adopt Calibri a "wasteful" diversity move

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.

SanjayMehta2• 7 months ago

His boss' posts on Truth Social should be in Comic Sans.

Gualdrapo• 7 months ago

Just remember that when the CERN announced they finally could prove the existence of the Higgs boson, they did it using Comic Sans

https://blog.scottlogic.com/2012/07/05/the-higgs-boson-comic...

SanjayMehta2• 7 months ago

If Trump finds out he'll start "truthing" in Comic Sans and expecting a Nobel Prize in Physics.

elashri• 7 months ago

To be honest, in the official papers they did not use it for either CMS or ATLAS.

idatum• 7 months 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."

jaredklewis• 7 months ago

“Sometimes I get emotional over fonts.”

- Kanye West

seba_dos1• 7 months ago

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

chrisweekly• 7 months ago

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

fhdkweig• 7 months ago

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

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

tyre• 7 months ago

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

elzbardico• 7 months 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.

carlosjobim5• 7 months ago

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

treetalker• 7 months ago

Butterick on TNR:

(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.

nalnq• 7 months 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• 7 months ago

Aptos has been the default font for Microsoft Word since 2023.

rob743• 7 months ago

So now Times New Roman not only looks uninspired and bland, but also dated? Yeah, I would say that's a good fit...

Incipient• 7 months 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• 7 months ago

Honestly, I like Comic Sans.

It’s clear, legible and whimsical.

BobbyTables2• 7 months 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)

bjoli2• 7 months 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.

eviks• 7 months 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

comradesmith• 7 months ago

You can’t separate layout and design from typeface selection.

But yes I agree content must come first. Typeface probably comes second!

morshu90014• 7 months 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

chrismorgan2• 7 months 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.

cafard• 7 months 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• 7 months ago

My old eyes really wish more people used something like New Century Schoolbook.

MengerSponge• 7 months ago

I would have gone with Comic Sans

Funny, I would have gone with Tannenberg

rasse• 7 months ago

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.

js2• 7 months ago

Previously:

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

porridgeraisin• 7 months ago

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• 7 months ago

Well yeah? It's not about the font, it's about the pettiness of the declared reasons for the reversal

mitchbob• 7 months 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.

https://archive.ph/2025.12.10-001235/https://www.nytimes.com...

nine_k2• 7 months ago

To actually reduce waste, they could have switched to a narrower typeface, such as Roboto Condensed. At least it would save some paper occasionally.

gjvc3• 7 months ago

Roboto Condensed is excellent. It saves space so more words can be read with each eye movement (saccades) and is very clear.

anigbrowl• 7 months 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• 7 months 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.

rtpg• 7 months ago

The thing is that some section of the right has convinced itself that Calibre is some DEI font. Meanwhile the rest of the world is just living life and having to deal with people getting this worked up about the default font of Microsoft Office since what, 2008?

Parallel universes

mullingitover• 7 months ago

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.

softgrow• 7 months ago

As documented at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_Easter_eggs google search for "times new roman font" and the results are returned in that font. (https://www.google.com/search?q=Times+New+Roman+Font for the lazy). Looks terrible on my screen.

nine_k2• 7 months ago

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

cwnyth• 7 months ago

And Arial, Calibri, Georgia, and Cambria. It's missing Linux Libertine fonts, though. So typical.

layer83• 7 months ago

Wingdings would have been nice.

jacobgkau• 7 months ago

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.

vintermann6• 7 months ago

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.

jgalt212• 7 months 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.

ChrisArchitect• 7 months ago

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46212438

loadingcmd• 7 months 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!

seanmcdirmid• 7 months 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• 7 months ago

From the article:

The department under Blinken in early January 2023 had switched to Calibri

01HNNWZ0MV43FF• 7 months ago

They should bring back mid-Atlantic accents, then there'd be some silver lining to all this bullshit

hightrix2• 7 months 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.

dehugger• 7 months ago

which murders? are we talking about ICE or Venezuela or something else?

platevoltage3• 7 months ago

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

Hizonner• 7 months 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• 7 months ago

What's wrong with Fraktur?

maxnoe• 7 months 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.

SpicyLemonZest4• 7 months 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_ban2• 7 months 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.

watwut4• 7 months 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.

Terretta• 7 months 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

zzo38computer3• 7 months 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.

HPsquared2• 7 months ago

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

VerifiedReports7• 7 months ago

The crossbars on the capital "i" are not serifs.

But sans-serif fonts are certainly the prime offenders of rendering a lower-case L in place of the capital "i".

pmontra• 7 months ago

Yes and I use the Atkinson font in my emacs (for code) which is proportional and sans serif except for those characters

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atkinson_Hyperlegible

ajross4• 7 months 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.

IshKebab2• 7 months ago

Most people tend not to

Yeah because normal people never have to deal with alphanumeric strings...

MarkusQ2• 7 months 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.

tedunangst• 7 months ago

It's not like the State Department would ever mention Kim Jong the Second in documents.

VerifiedReports7• 7 months ago

"Only when used in a context where they can be confused."

So what are you supposed to when you're typing along and suddenly you find yourself in such a context? Switch the font of that one occurrence? That document? Your whole publishing effort?

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.

da_chicken• 7 months ago

Yes, exactly this. Judging a document font based on how well it functions as a programming font is weird.

jazzyjackson6• 7 months 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

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

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

vessenes2• 7 months ago

Ooh, I like Public Sans! I hadn't seen it before.

layer83• 7 months ago

It’s also on GitHub: https://github.com/uswds/public-sans

The glyph repertoire is a bit limited, though.

wombatpm• 7 months ago

Is USWDS still a thing? I thought they were DOGED out of existence.

gerdesj2• 7 months 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)

irishcoffee3• 7 months ago

I thought I was the only one that still crossed a seven and slashed a zero. I don’t dot an ‘O’ however.

FeteCommuniste2• 7 months ago

The linked A+E thing is called a ligature:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligature_(writing)

Same root as "ligament" and "ligand."

dragonwriter6• 7 months ago

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

Its called the letter “ash” and its borrowed from... (Old) English. Though its functionally reverted to being a ligature, which is what is was before it was a letter.

(Also, English has &, which was a letter even more recently—its current name being taken from the way it was recited as part of the alphabet [“and, per se, and”], including the effect of slurring with speed—and which also originated as a ligature.)

DocTomoe2• 7 months ago

There's no pride in not having diacritics, it's a sign of an insufficient script. It's the reason why English writing gives no hint of pronunciation.

buntsai• 7 months ago

The use of the "font" spelling variant rather than "fount" is any case a clearer indication of etymology. After all, a "fount" of types refers not to its role as a fountain of printing (fons fontis L -> fontaine OF -> fountain) but the pouring out, melting and casting of lead (fundo fundere fudu fusum [fused!] L -> fondre / fonte F).

rtkwe5• 7 months ago

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.

adrian_b5• 7 months ago

On the Web I see very frequently foreign names, user handles or URLs where I am confused about whether there is an I or an l, because that Web page has chosen to use a bad sans serif font that does not differentiate these letters.

Sometimes there is no problem because the words or links containing ambiguous letters can be copied and pasted. Other times there is an annoying problem because either the stupid designer has disabled copying (or like in the output of Google and some other search engines, copying does not copy the visible text, but a link that cannot be used in a different context, outside the browser), or because I want to write on my computer a link or name that I have received on my phone.

TacticalCoder• 7 months ago

Another issue is due to the font size and font metrics

The biggest issue is that you don't replace a serif font with a sans-serif one "because diversity".

There's a reason signs on the highway are using sans-serif and there's a reason letters and books are using serif fonts.

I did both write and typeset books and honestly it's facepalming that the previous administration did switch to Calibri "because of diversity and because it's now the default in Word".

Ah, OK. Microsoft is, partly, behind the move. This explains that.

moomoo112• 7 months ago

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.

echelon• 7 months ago

You know the fonts on our roads are standardized? And a lot of other official documents?

Designing a font that will be public domain forever costs next to nothing. It's a one-time cost that pays dividends into the future and that will probably outlive us.

The government would create something standard and accessible, and anyone could use it. No encumbered licensing.

I think companies refreshing design systems is a waste of money, but the government doing it is actually incredibly prudent.

amluto2• 7 months ago

Neither Calibri nor Times New Roman are free to use, although they are free in certain contexts for Windows users. The US Government is paying plenty for them.

VerifiedReports7• 7 months ago

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

bulbar3• 7 months ago

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.

Terr_2• 7 months ago

In general, yes, but for these leaders... the less sabotaging impact they have, the better.

nailer6• 7 months ago

The global impression of the US is worth thinking about. The font is part of that.

hamandcheese• 7 months ago

not on stuff that from a practical point of view is totally irrelevant.

The modern era we live in has far, far too much of this attitude. It's the same force eroding craftsmanship, attention to detail, and human dignity.

I find it quite reasonable for someone to care about the presentation of official government communications.

And just so we are clear, I also think Rubio is a horrible person.

otikik• 7 months ago

So, two options.

a) It's a smoke screen. Do something bombastic and provocative so that the opposition chews on that while something else more "important" passes undetected.

b) Nah, he's just stupid.

oneeyedpigeon11• 7 months ago

It's not about anything practical, it's all about the message.

timeon• 7 months ago

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.

abeyer• 7 months ago

Only rich ones. Lowbrow pedophiles who hang out in pizza parlors are a whole different thing.

ensocode• 7 months ago

ha ha MAGA font. Only big letters

thiht• 7 months ago

THE BEST LETTERS

RobotToaster2• 7 months ago

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

adrian_b5• 7 months ago

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).

r0ckarong• 7 months ago

Good thing the world is entirely stable and the United States have literally no more pressing issues.

layer83• 7 months ago

Serifs should improve stability.

alexandre_m2• 7 months ago

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

RajBhai• 7 months 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.

IAmBroom2• 7 months 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!"

shagie2• 7 months ago

And Comic Sans for letters sent to friends finishing design school, obviously.

... and libressl. https://web.archive.org/web/20140625075722/http://www.libres... (and the talk - https://youtu.be/GnBbhXBDmwU?si=gMlhb2Xis5V8sR6K&t=2939 )

nixpulvis• 7 months ago

I want to read a study that compares what readers estimate for much effort was put into producing the same page of text in two contemporary and basic serif and sans-serif fonts. My hypothesis is that the serif font is viewed as more polished or refined, and therefore the result of more hours of work. But I could be wrong.

This is in-line with the advice here to use serif for long form and sans for short. When you're making signs and things like that, you don't have the repeated forms to inform your ability to interpret letters, so the serifs act to confuse readers, while in long form, they add flair, which could be more artistic and tasteful.

Cipater• 7 months ago

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

tyleo• 7 months ago

Never before has a font change been so politically divisive.

I’ll personally be taking my votes to supporters of Helvetica next election.

hnarn• 7 months ago

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

dghf5• 7 months ago

Wasn't it originally intended for signage, advertising, titles, other display text, etc., rather than for body text?

oneeyedpigeon11• 7 months ago

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

hbogert• 7 months ago

The left and right signalling is such a waste of everyone's time and effort. Reactive pettiness

miltonlost• 7 months 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.

SpicyLemonZest4• 7 months 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.

mathgradthrow2• 7 months ago

Is it "signalling" when the left's change was for an accessibility reason, to enable more people to be able to easily read?

Uh, yes.

cratermoon2• 7 months ago

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...>

cratermoon2• 7 months 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?

<https://web.archive.org/web/20151207071605/http://historywei...>

sombragris• 7 months 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.

gowld• 7 months ago

Calibri was the default MS Word from 2007 until July 2023, when Aptos took over.

Calibri became the State font in Jan 2023.

seydor2• 7 months 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

Bender• 7 months 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.

HPsquared2• 7 months 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.

steanne• 7 months ago

i change it with refont

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

lateforwork• 7 months ago

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

umanwizard• 7 months ago

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

infotainment• 7 months 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• 7 months ago

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

weinzierl2• 7 months ago

To be fair, they did choose a Roman one - one with proper Italics even.

askew• 7 months ago

A "thank you" for La Liberté éclairant le monde.

ben_w• 7 months 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».

publicdebates• 7 months 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.

throw03172019• 7 months ago

I’m surprised this administration did not chose Comic Sans as the default font.

user____name2• 7 months ago

Rubio looks more like a Papyrus person.

alamortsubite• 7 months ago

Can Comic Sans do all caps?

pinkmuffinere2• 7 months ago

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

vintermann6• 7 months ago

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

vkou2• 7 months ago

It's on brand for his party.

rjzzleep• 7 months ago

People will often use their power to do seemingly meaningless things, when they don't know how to solve the actual problems on their plate.

3rodents• 7 months ago

Finally, some good news from this administration.

seb1204• 7 months ago

Well, you can come up with this position or view on a 5 minute toilet break after reading something that rallied you up. Once you have a voice you can trigger an avalanche with very little it seems.

tstrimple2• 7 months ago

What do you mean the TIRE company actually reviews restaurants?

n3storm• 7 months ago

with current timeline expect the unexpected

wavemode• 7 months ago

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.

wvh• 7 months ago

It's becoming increasingly hard to distinguish an Onion article from actual media. Post-truth indeed.

gravy• 7 months ago

Didn't I read somewhere that serif fonts are better for dyslexia

int0x29• 7 months ago

Ah yes Calibri is now "DEI". Rubio don't you have a real job?

itsjustjordan• 7 months ago

Slightly related but today I learned if you Google a font the site changes to that font.

yincrash• 7 months 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.

aprilthird2021• 7 months 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

cogman10• 7 months 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.

epolanski2• 7 months ago

Because politicians are making political choices on fonts rather than leaving those matters to technicians.

lurk2• 7 months 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).

Eduard• 7 months 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).

amiga386• 7 months ago

Per the State Department in 2023:

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.

blueflow2• 7 months ago

No? If signalling led to an decision, the reversal is not automatically signalling based. Calibri is just not a good font.

vvpan• 7 months 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?

epolanski2• 7 months 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.

WhyOhWhyQ2• 7 months ago

Is Calibri actually more accessible? Every step of this story seems pointless and fake.

papercrane2• 7 months 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.

blueflow2• 7 months ago

Link on that, as OCR should be more reliable with Times New Roman due to significant serifs.

carlosjobim5• 7 months ago

That doesn't make much sense, since a typewriter will neither type Calibri nor Times New Roman. And OCR should only be needed for type written documents, because any document made with Calibri or TNR is already digital.

legitster2• 7 months 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.

icecube1232• 7 months 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.

sroerick• 7 months 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?

ajross4• 7 months 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.

WhyOhWhyQ2• 7 months ago

Interesting. The Wikipedia page for Times New Roman has a pretty fun blurb printed in the newspaper when they first implemented it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_New_Roman?st_source=ai_m...

jimbob45• 7 months ago

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

anilakar• 7 months ago

present a unified, professional voice in all communications

Might want to start by banning tweeting then.

ModernMech• 7 months 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."

hs586• 7 months ago

I just realized that if you google the font (e.g. "Calibri font"), you get the search results in that font. Neat!

_bohm• 7 months ago

Works for lots of other fonts too :)

Havoc3• 7 months 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• 7 months 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.

Havoc3• 7 months 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

Untit1ed• 7 months ago

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

SpaceManNabs2• 7 months 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).

mhd• 7 months ago

Don't a lot of courts use/mandate Century? Just use that. Better than TNR. If you can't afford a custom font…

bakies• 7 months ago

This admin does like Roman stuff- like their salute

deadbabe• 7 months ago

Similarly, under the Biden administration there was a push for memory safety and adopting the Rust programming language.

Now memory safety sounds too woke, and Trump administration will be moving back to pure C.

throwacct• 7 months 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.

jazzyjackson6• 7 months ago

The story is that people with better things to do are spending their time on this

marcusverus• 7 months ago

This argument has never, in all of human history, been made in good faith.

legitster2• 7 months 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".

embedding-shape2• 7 months ago

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/12/addr...
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.

Havoc3• 7 months 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

rootusrootus3• 7 months ago

Go visit the popular hangouts for folks of the far right persuasion and you learn pretty quickly that this stuff is absolutely important to them, and they get spun up about it. What you don't see discussed is policy. It's almost 100% outrage about cultural issues and pretty much any reason to hate the left. Never substance.

To be fair, in response to this dynamic the left has gotten pretty good at focusing on hate for the other side, too. We all lose when nobody wants to talk policy any more.

apercu• 7 months ago

The current administration will do anything to distract folks from the corruption, fraud, grift and incompetence.

And it works!

weinzierl2• 7 months ago

Leaders and typefaces:

In 1941 Adolf Hitler personally gave order to make the use of the Antiqua mandatory and forbade the use of Fraktur and Schwabacher typefaces.

https://ligaturix.de/bormann.htm

denkmoon• 7 months ago

Fascism relies on politicisation of aesthetic

PaulHoule2• 7 months ago

See V is for Vendetta, I would argue there is a sort of seduction in the Baudrillard sense involved.

actionfromafar6• 7 months ago

How is that downvoted? You can’t seriously disagree?

vessenes2• 7 months 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.

watwut4• 7 months 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

1970-01-013• 7 months 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...

pinkmuffinere2• 7 months 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.

actionfromafar6• 7 months ago

Yeah it was so the occupied peoples could read the edicts better. Sp perhaps not so neutral, after all.

viraptor2• 7 months 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.

loeg• 7 months ago

As they say, "Hitler drank water."

nl2• 7 months ago

I rather assumed so as well, but a big of digging turns up a whole history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiqua%E2%80%93Fraktur_disput...

Surprisingly to me the Fraktur typeface was the traditional "German" typeface but was disliked by Hitler.

goku124• 7 months ago

He just didn't like the font so he ordered it to be changed.

There is your answer. He imposed his will - that's what dictators do. You have to be careful when the reason for any costly change is one individual's personal preferences. It's a bad omen.

Equivalent to your boss ordering tabs be used instead of spaces.

That's not always equivalent, especially if it is to set a standard. Obviously, some people using spaces and the others using tabs is not ideal in situations you're referring to. It's also fine to change the standard, if they find a significant problem with the current convention. But if your boss wants it changed, and their only explanation is their dislike of the status-quo, then that's a red flag. The problem isn't very serious right now, but could grow into one in the future and you have to be on the watch.

dang• 7 months ago

(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.)

JSR_FDED• 7 months ago

Such a dingbat move

ivanjermakov• 7 months ago

Times New Roman is extremely common and often the only accepted font for official documents and colloquial works in post-soviet countries: https://www.cnews.ru/news/top/2018-12-10_rossijskim_chinovni....

I have only bad memories of using it since I directly associate it with endless formatting fixes for my diploma and course works.

actionfromafar6• 7 months ago

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

giantrobot• 7 months ago

Subtle and clever. You got a laugh out of me.

Fnoord7• 7 months ago

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!

oldsklgdfth• 7 months ago

Slightly tangential, is there any chance this is motivated by profit or someone making money off this?

Otherwise, seems kinda benign and random.

rcpt• 7 months ago

It's probably to ensure people keep talking about "woke" which tends to be good for the right.

icecube1232• 7 months 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.

embedding-shape2• 7 months 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.

dgeiser13• 7 months ago

The ole DEIA font.

xrd• 7 months ago

I for one am grateful someone is finally standing up to these lunatic radical typographers and their diversity, equity and italics tyranny.

snickerbockers• 7 months ago

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.

PaulHoule2• 7 months 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.

BLKNSLVR• 7 months ago

The princess and the pea.

thesagan• 7 months ago

Once again Garamond is passed over. I truly live in dark times.

rorylawless• 7 months ago

This is approaching Saparmurat Niyazov levels of weirdness.

0xbadcafebee• 7 months 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?

morshu90014• 7 months ago

Wasn't there was a previous "coup" that changed it from TNR to Calibri? TNR is nicer though.

stego-tech• 7 months 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.

thayne• 7 months 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?

nonethewiser• 7 months ago

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.

oneeyedpigeon11• 7 months ago

That wasn't the point; the point was about the hypocrisy of calling it "wasteful".

rat87• 7 months 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).

simondotau2• 7 months 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.

1970-01-013• 7 months ago

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

simondotau2• 7 months ago

Everything produced by congress should be stored in a git repository hosted in the Capitol.

shadowtree• 7 months 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.

_vqpz• 7 months ago

Times New Roman is proprietary as well

dsevil2• 7 months ago

I think there's clones of it that aren't.

Arodex• 7 months ago

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

chrismorgan2• 7 months 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.

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.

Sunspark4• 7 months ago

The Croscore fonts ARE the Liberation fonts, just renamed.

I keep both for naming compatibility and also because the 1.0 Liberation versions had truetype hinting (2.0 and up did not).

jeroenhd• 7 months ago

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.

SpaceManNabs2• 7 months ago

This is silly as Montserrat is the only true choice.

khazhoux• 7 months 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.”

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-polit...

UncleOxidant• 7 months ago

There's a new serif in town.

alexandre_m2• 7 months ago

Underrated comment.

clickety_clack• 7 months ago

The only non-partisan choice is comic sans.

gjvc3• 7 months 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.

dsevil2• 7 months 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.

rtkwe5• 7 months ago

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.

Fnoord7• 7 months ago

For aesthetic or other preferences you change the default font to whatever you please. The default font shouldn't be about aesthetics, it should be first and foremost about usability. Especially on printed media since there it cannot be changed in a whim.

A couple of years ago I went into archives of Dutch newspapers to learn whether and how the famine of hunger in Ukraine (known as Holodomor) was reported back in 1930's. Fuck me, it was hard to read those excerpts. But it is what it is. OCR could've converted the font. The problem is, is the OCR accurate? Like, is my search with keywords having a good SnR, or am I missing out on evidence?

Personally, Times New Roman was likely the reason I did not like Mozilla Thunderbird. I have to look into that.

Fnoord7• 7 months ago

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

Cordiali• 7 months ago

He had special glasses with a special lens to read.

Bifocals, I'm guessing.

jimnotgym2• 7 months ago

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

alphabetag675• 7 months ago

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.

dghf5• 7 months ago

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.

b00ty4breakfast• 7 months 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.

joshuaheard• 7 months ago

Most federal courts require documents filed there to be in Times New Roman font.

BuyMyBitcoins• 7 months ago

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

herewulf• 7 months ago

BVT NOT TO BE CONFVSED UUITH TIMES OLD ROMAN.

bvan• 7 months 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.

iambateman• 7 months 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.

gjvc3• 7 months ago

it's a joy https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Roboto and especially https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Roboto+Condensed

RobLach• 7 months ago

The ole' turning around a failing effort with a rebrand.

mjmas• 7 months ago

Looking through a selection of papers on serif vs non-serif fonts the conclusions seem to be that there is little difference when printed, but when viewing on-screen sans-serif is preferred.

Svoka• 7 months ago

I could consider anti-DEI sentiment that 'people jumping the lane' as morally acceptable (valid by itself but based on wrong assumptions), but this, this is just evil. Like why would you change font because it is harder to read for someone?

IceHegel• 7 months ago

I'm dyslexic and I much prefer to read Times New Roman to Calibri. I think it's a good move.

dramm• 7 months ago

Comic Sans might have been a more appropriate choice. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

jdub• 7 months ago

There are very few ways in which US governance and/or regulation leads the developed world, but a huge (and surprising) one is the 1990 (!) Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). It is astonishingly, transformationally inclusive, and makes life better for every American (because everyone needs accessibility to different degrees, at different times).

Switching from Calibri back to Times New Roman "because DEI" 100% tracks with this administration's spiteful Project 2025 vandalism.

praptak• 7 months ago

Calibri was supposedly easier to read by people with disabilities. While this itself is debatable, that's not the reasoning behind the font switch. The mere attempt at making life easier for disadvantaged people is labeled DEI and as such cannot be tolerated by this administration.

midnitewarrior• 7 months ago

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.

t0lo2• 7 months ago

I listened to the economist podcast on that- hilarious in the worst way- was leading harvard research

kgwgk• 7 months ago

The funny thing is that they were indeed funding “trans” mice research:

To understand the effects of feminizing sex hormone therapy on vaccination, we propose to develop a mouse model of gender-affirming hormone therapy, assess its relevance to human medicine through singe-cell transcriptome studies, and test the immune responses of “cis” vs. “trans” mice to a HIV vaccine.

https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10849830#descriptio...

vkou2• 7 months ago

More than half. Almost everything they do is virtue signaling.

rdiddly• 7 months ago

All true except the fact that it's not virtue that they're signaling.

t0lo2• 7 months ago

Nope- times new roman just looks better.

logifail4• 7 months ago

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...

userbinator2• 7 months ago

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)"

That may be a case of "I hate reading this font so much I don't want to do more than skim over the text."

dragonwriter6• 7 months ago

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)"

What you actually want to compare speed in the most preferred font to, to show that individual choice is or is not better than one-size-fits-all dictate, is speed in the font that would be chosen as the universal choice by whichever mechanism would be used (to show it is universally better, show that there is no universal font choice that would lead to the average user being faster than with their preferred font.)

All comparing each individual's preferred font to each individual's fastest is showing that an individualized test-based optimized font choice is better for reading speed than individual preference font choice, which I guess is interesting if you are committed to individualized choices, but not if the entire question is whether individual or centralized choices are superior.

unsupp0rted• 7 months ago

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)

oblio2• 7 months ago

Microsoft Office (and Windows) changed the default font more than a decade ago.

Changing it back is the exact definition of performative work.

Edit: 19 years ago. Almost 2 decades ago!

Propelloni4• 7 months ago

That's very charitable--especially considering that leaving the font alone in the first place would have been the smaller option.

And don't get me started about the current meddling of the executive in my private life? I haven't had a more intrusive administration since living in Singapore.

beowulfey• 7 months ago

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

behnamoh4• 7 months ago

It was the default, now it's Aptos.

journal• 7 months ago

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

wltr• 7 months ago

There was an event (or events?) in the past, when some past documents were forged, but with the default (in MS Word, I suppose) Calibre font, which was released years later. I wonder if this has something to do with it.

I love if someone remembers that event better and can provide a link. My memory serves it was about a decade or so ago.

ropable• 7 months ago

It's beyond satire that US conservatives are now somehow upset about certain fonts being woke.

retrocog• 7 months ago

Fell asleep in America and woke up in Lilliput

ycombigrator2• 7 months ago

What do you call a Banana Republic that has lots of different kinds of bananas?

iguana_shine• 7 months ago

This headline is obnoxious

userbinator2• 7 months ago

I never liked Calibri when it was pushed aggressively by MS and showed up everywhere - I prefer Arial or Helvetica for sans-serif, and think TNR is a good default for serif, with Computer Modern a close second.

dghf5• 7 months ago

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

bb88• 7 months ago

TIL: if you google Times New Roman, you get Google search results in Times New Roman.

You also get Calibri if you search for it, but not Zapf Dingbats.

seydor2• 7 months ago

A Glorious Font for the Times New Roman Caesar

goku124• 7 months ago

So if this one is a dictator, does that mean the next one is an emperor?

zkmon• 7 months ago

The first-world problems!

chinathrow2• 7 months ago

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.

What a waste of government time and spending.

ksynwa• 7 months ago

Calibri is woke?

coffeebeqn• 7 months ago

I guess I’m glad they’re focusing on this rather than breaking something else in society

klez• 7 months ago

The point being that if the change to Calibri has been done to improve accessibility (hence: inclusion) that makes it woke.

Which is stupid, of course, especially considering that sans-serif fonts improve readability on screens for most people, not for a minority.

EDIT: extraneous "don't" in the middle of a sentence

Muromec• 7 months ago

The font is not masculine enough.

mikkupikku3• 7 months ago

It's just ragebaiting. Don't take the bait.

If I say I bought a yellow car, nobody cares. If I say I bought a yellow car to troll the libtards, now everybody is mad even though what I said makes no sense and it all has little consequence anyway.

beambot• 7 months ago

Tilting at windmills...

RobotToaster2• 7 months ago

Tilting at wingdings

moltopoco6• 7 months ago

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.

Intermernet• 7 months ago

Authoritative or Authoritarian?

oneeyedpigeon11• 7 months ago

Because, even if there is a good argument to replace Calibri on grounds of professionalism, the cable still explicitly mentions the "anti-woke" aspect. At best, it's another sideswipe aimed at minorities and people who represent them. At worst, it's 'doing something wrong purely because of prejudice'.

Zanfa• 7 months ago

To restore decorum and professionalism

Given the complete absence of either in the current administration, this is clearly not the real reason. So “woke” is the only explanation left.

Propelloni4• 7 months ago

If it is about professionalism, why mention DEIA at all? It's just virtue-signalling. Reuters realized that and pointed it out.

mikkupikku3• 7 months ago

How much will it cost to change fonts?

rathole26• 7 months ago

To change tens to hundreds of millions of documents, roughly 50-200M USD.

throw__away73912• 7 months ago

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.

red-iron-pine3• 7 months ago

in this case "Rubio" means that ICE would deport him if they saw him randomly on the streets of Chicago

hopelite2• 7 months ago

Did you have that kind of reaction, that it’s absurd, when Blinken ordered the use of Calibri after ~20 years of consistent use of Times New Roman?

It is objectively more concerning and “absurd”, regardless of “team”, that Blinken arbitrarily introduced fragmentation by adding an additional font to official government communications when a convention had been established across government to use Times New Roman.

red-iron-pine3• 7 months ago

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

hopelite2• 7 months ago

Or maybe the government should have a common convention regarding official government communications, which Blinken added fragmentation to by arbitrarily changing the font away from Times New Roman.

JKCalhoun2• 7 months ago

"wasteful diversity move"

Wild. I'm curious now if someone has an ordered list of fonts from the gayest to the straightest.

baggachipz2• 7 months ago

The levels of pettiness in this administration know no bounds. I'm sure they'll forbid the use of "woke", and require all government employees to say "I terminated sleep this morning".

stronglikedan• 7 months ago

What an odd take. Every administration does this sort of petty stuff. nothing new under the sun.

rbanffy6• 7 months ago

The levels of pettiness in this administration know no bounds

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelt...

throwaway8582• 7 months ago

What a waste of government time and spending

Was the switch to Calibri in 2023 also a waste of time and money, or are font switches only bad when the Trump administration does them?

ryoshoe• 7 months ago

If the belief is that switching a font is wasteful, why is the solution is to switch fonts again?

orthoxerox• 7 months ago

Should've picked Charis SIL. It's a legible and serious serif font, doesn't make you look like you picked the boring Big Tech default and has explicitly Christian origins.

7bit2• 7 months ago

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.

DocTomoe2• 7 months ago

"Decorum" and Times New Roman. That's the equivalent of pointlessly plastering everything with marble and gold, you think you are doing Roman Empire meets Versailles, but ultimately, you're just being tacky.

vanguardanon• 7 months ago

I just wanted to add a comment that I never knew but if you google Times New Roman they display the entire Google web search results page in Times New Roman.

platevoltage3• 7 months ago

Why is this a story? I'm fairly certain fonts change all of the time. Oh right, it's because they can't just make the change, they have to say something stupid about it. Republican voters, how are you not insulted? Is this really all it takes to get you to that voting booth?

nelox• 7 months ago

Reuters calling the switch a "font" change instead of a typeface change is troubling, though consistent with a society that now casually refers to all pasta as "spaghetti". A typeface is the design; a font is its specific instance. This is basic knowledge, taught to children, houseplants, and most domesticated goats.

A simple correction would stop this spiral, but Reuters appears committed to forging a bold new era in which terminology is chosen at random, like drawing Scrabble tiles from a bag and declaring them journalism.

fhd2• 7 months ago

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.

Ghoelian• 7 months ago

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?

dghf5• 7 months ago

Originally, a font (also spelled fount, at least formerly) was a physical thing: a collection of metal slugs, each bearing the reversed shape of a letter or other symbol (a glyph, in typographical parlance). You would arrange these slugs in a wooden frame, apply a layer of ink to them, and press them against a sheet of paper.

The typeface dictated the shapes of those glyphs. So you could own a font of Caslon's English Roman typeface, for example. If you wanted to print text in different sizes, you would need multiple fonts. If you wanted to print in italic as well as roman (upright), you would need another font for that, too.

As there was a finite number of slugs available, what text you could print on a single sheet was also constrained to an extent by your font(s). Modern Welsh, for example, has no letter "k": yet mediaeval Welsh used it liberally. The change came when the Bible was first printed in Welsh: the only fonts available were made for English, and didn't have enough k's. So the publisher made the decision to use c for k, and an orthographical rule was born.

Digital typography, of course, has none of those constraints: digital text can be made larger or smaller, or heavier or lighter, or slanted or not, by directly manipulating the glyph shapes; and you're not going to run out of a particular letter.

So that raises the question: what is a font in digital terms?

There appear to be two schools of thought:

1. A font is a typeface at a particular size and in a particular weight etc. So Times New Roman is a typeface, but 12pt bold italic Times New Roman is a font. This attempts to draw parallels with the physical constraints of a moveable-type font.

2. A font is, as it always was, the instantiation of a typeface. In digital terms, this means a font file: a .ttf or .otf or whatever. This may seem like a meaningless distinction, but consider: you can get different qualities of font files for the same typeface. A professional, paid-for font will (or should, at least) offer better kerning and spacing rules, better glyph coverage, etc. And if you want your text italic or bold, or particularly small or particularly large (display text), your software can almost certainly just digitally transform the shapes in your free/cheap, all-purpose font, But you will get better results with a font that has been specifically designed to be small or italic or whatever: text used for small captions, for example, is more legible with a larger x-height and less variation in stroke width than that used for body text. Adobe offers 65 separate fonts for its Minion typeface, in different combinations of italic/roman, weight (regular/medium/semibold/bold), width (regular/condensed) and size (caption/body/subhead/display).

Personally, I prefer the second definition.

dghf5• 7 months ago

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).

lil-lugger• 7 months ago

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

Macha• 7 months ago

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

https://xkcd.com/2501/

oneeyedpigeon11• 7 months ago

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.

OhMeadhbh• 7 months ago

This makes me want to run for President on the platform of Comic Sans for all government documents.

gverrilla• 7 months ago

Dog whistle for transphobic people.

pengaru• 7 months ago

If only this administration would limit its actions to such forms of bikeshedding...

3836293648• 7 months ago

The motivation is truly awful, but the result? Thank goodness. Calibri just screams unprofessional

thih9• 7 months ago

To restore decorum and professionalism to the Department’s written work products…

Who defines decorum and professionalism? Because I’d say this change is anything but.

Then again, this is very partisan and so subjective. Still, I’m not a fan of a government pushing certain esthetics with such a BS justification.

goku124• 7 months ago

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.

Cryptoclidus• 7 months ago

Bullshit looks better with serifs?

wiz21c• 7 months ago

really good 1st of April joke !!! rotfl

ahem... We're not the 1st of April...

LucasFonts2• 7 months ago

Our studio, LucasFonts, designed Calibri. Here are our CEO Luc(as) de Groot’s thoughts on the matter:

The decision to abandon Calibri on the grounds of it being a so-called “wasteful diversity font” is both amusing and regrettable. Calibri was specifically designed to enhance readability on modern computer screens and was selected by Microsoft in 2007 to replace Times New Roman as the default font in the Office suite. There were sound reasons for moving away from Times: Calibri performs exceptionally well at small sizes and on standard office monitors, whereas serif fonts like Times New Roman tend to appear more distorted. While serif fonts are well-suited to high-resolution displays, such as those found on modern smartphones, on typical office screens the serifs introduce unnecessary visual noise and can be particularly problematic for users with impaired vision, such as older adults.

Professional typography can be achieved with both serif and sans-serif fonts. However, Times New Roman—a typeface older than the current president—presents unique challenges. Originally crafted in Great Britain for newspaper printing, Times was optimised for paper, with each letterform meticulously cut and tested for specific sizes. In the digital era, larger size drawings were repurposed as models, resulting in a typeface that appears too thin and sharp when printed at high quality.

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.

Calibri, by contrast, incorporates extensive spacing adjustments and language-specific refinements. The digital version of Times New Roman, developed in the early days of computing, offers only minimal kerning and letter-pair adjustments. This is especially evident in words set in all capitals—such as “CHICAGO”—where the spacing is inconsistent: the letters “HIC” are tightly packed, while “CAG” are spaced too far apart. Microsoft cannot rectify these issues without altering the appearance of existing documents.

nabla9• 7 months ago

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

butchcassidi• 7 months ago

I would rather see Wingdings.

lo_zamoyski• 7 months ago

I would say it’s worse than that. Read Plato’s “Republic” and you may come to appreciate a much more expansive appropriateness of Comic Sans, beyond just the current administration.

nimbius• 7 months ago

i tend to find the kerning issues noted by the calibri team are moot. most Times New Roman is perfectly legible with careful observation and maybe a fresh cup of covfefe.

adolph• 7 months ago

Your comment may be in jest but there is some evidence that "easier to read" does not benefit "retain what was read."

  And that brings us back to these ugly fonts. Because their shapes are 
  unfamiliar, because they are less legible, they make the mind work a little 
  harder; the slight frisson of Comic Sans wakes us up or at least prevents us 
  from leaning on the usual efficiencies. “The complex fonts . . . function 
  like an alarm,” Alter writes. They signal “that we need to recruit additional 
  mental resources to overcome that sense of difficulty.”

https://lithub.com/the-ugliness-of-comic-sans-has-a-practica...

ndkap• 7 months ago

As an aside, I didn't know what Comic Sans looks like, so I searched on Google and it rendered the whole page in that font. I tried with other Fonts too like Arial and Times New Roman, and it did the same there. So cool!

jpster• 7 months ago

I beg to differ. Wingdings is more like it.

BasilofBasiley• 7 months ago

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.)

tbyehl• 7 months ago

what they really want

What they really want is to smear something the previous administration did as DEIA, woke, wasteful, and anti-conservative (ie: change).

TNR is awful and anyone who actually cares about serifs knows there are better options.

notachatbot123• 7 months ago

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.

rob743• 7 months ago

...and then he ignores them.

red-iron-pine3• 7 months ago

lol he's not reading printouts.

Tor3• 7 months ago

The way he writes indicates that he has very little experience with reading in the first place. Weird wording, strange capitalization and punctiation, etc.

bayarearefugee• 7 months ago

Trump doesn't read, according to Pete Davidson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUW3HfPEdKY

mschuster91• 7 months ago

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.

Cthulhu_• 7 months ago

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).

Uehreka• 7 months ago

(disclaimer: I am Dutch).

Well then I suppose it’s only appropriate to say: Goede fhtagn

mghackerlady• 7 months ago

I've always heard this joke with the french instead of the dutch

rob743• 7 months ago

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.

Sunspark4• 7 months ago

As a lay person who likes to look at fonts closely, the purpose they are intended for matters. I don't like the Atkinson font for body text because I find it too round. For a transit sign I suppose it is fine since it would be printed at display sizes and only momentarily gazed at.

Calibri is a high-quality font that works as body text, but it's cold.

Times NR on paper is fine, on screen it is not fine unless you have a high resolution display.

hilbert422• 7 months ago

This reply is far too polite, but I understand protocol and necessity dictates those words.

If you cannot say it then let me: that spiteful, revengeful petty-minded fuckwit needs to be told that it's a fucked decision of the first order, and that someone in his position has no right nor the time to be involved in grinding the minutiae of state so fine.

Heaven help us, please!

rbanffy6• 7 months ago

Heaven help us, please!

Midterms are coming. You know what to do.

behnamoh4• 7 months ago

Politics aside, I never liked Calibri, until last year. I think it has a place for small text printed on paper, but other than that, there are far better fonts out there. The non-sharp/round edges/corners and the fact that it looks a bit childish make me not want to use it in anything serious/professional. It's also waaay over-used by people who don't have a taste in design and just select the default font in their PowerPoint/Word files.

tracker12• 7 months ago

Calibri is a pretty nice screen font. That said, I would rather see official documents in a non-commercially licensed font face that can be used by any/all OSes and platforms without incumbrances.

scelerat• 7 months ago

The current administration is regressive and explicitly, triumphantly anti-expert.

Within this environment the decision to eschew the font that was expertly designed for present needs in favor of one designed in the past for different ones makes perfect sense.

johannesrexx• 7 months ago

Your Calibri font is Microsoft proprietary and is not open source. It exists so that MS Office documents won't look right on non-Microsoft systems. It's a dirty aspect of Microsoft's Embrace-Extend-Extinguish stategy meant to further its monopoly. It's disgusting that you cite all of these wonder benefits of Calibri without admitting the true underlying reason it exists.

pyuser583• 7 months ago

“Modern computer screens” have changed substantially since 2007. Calibri was not designed for 4k.

That’s why Microsoft no longer sets it as default, and it is expected to be phased out by institutional consumers.

Calibri served its time. But it’s time is over.

ndsipa_pomu8• 7 months ago

I'm surprised he didn't get Hugo Boss to design a font

amluto2• 7 months ago

IMO Calibri and Times New Roman are both poor choices: they are not free. The US Government’s works are not generally subject to copyright, and IMO it’s rather obnoxious for their fonts to be restricted. Also, Calibri is specifically a Microsoft font, and maybe the government should be a bit less beholden to Microsoft.

IMO the government should pick something available under an appropriate free license or commission a new font for the purpose.

(I personally much prefer Times New Roman to Calibri for printed documents, but that’s neither here nor there.)

tobr• 7 months ago

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)

AlanYx• 7 months ago

This is my view as well. That being said, Time New Roman is marginally better because there are several good, modern open source alternatives with the same metrics that can be substituted. And there's good tool support virtually everywhere for those alternatives, like in TeX.

There is a metric-compatible open alternative to Calibri (Carlito) but it seems more vulnerable to lawyer shenanigans and doesn't have extensive tool support.

FinnKuhn• 7 months ago

Which Times New Roman alternatives would you recommend?

aqrit• 7 months ago

MS makes "Times New Roman" available (at no cost), but not "Calibri".

Stratoscope• 7 months ago

Additional reporting from Gizmodo:

Marco Rubio Orders State Dept to Stop Using Calibri Font in Anti-DEI Push

https://gizmodo.com/marco-rubio-orders-state-dept-to-stop-us...

thinkindie• 7 months ago

I'm amazed by all these silly priorities some people can find.

GeorgeRichard• 7 months ago

>decorum and professionalism Yes, the hallmark of the Trump administration.

oneeyedpigeon11• 7 months ago

I'm definitely not suggesting someone make one, but Rubio sounds like an awfully good name for a font...

HackerThemAll• 7 months ago

Noto Serif would have been a better choice, it is far more readable and is capable of representing all languages in the world.

But then it's bigger, for example to replace Time New Roman 10 it would require Noto Serif 8.5.

martin_a• 7 months ago

Besides all the daily stuff that happens with the current US government, I'm _really_ excited (not in the best way) to see how the citizens of the USA, Europe and the whole world will deal with the aftermaths of the current government.

Strange times to live in.

jennyholzer• 7 months ago

I am staunchly anti-Republican.

In my opinion, the sole cultural domain in which Republicans are far stronger than Democrats is graphic design.

If you do not have a strong graphic design background, I'd urge you to avoid taking sides on this matter on the basis of party affiliation.

This is good politics from the Republicans.

In my opinion it is disastrous for Democrats to align themselves with mediocre cultural products.

Microsoft has a very close relationship with the US government and over the last 20+ years has demonstrated extremely low quality standards. The US government's shift to using Calibri is clearly a consequence of this close relationship.

Claims about the "readability" of Calibri in comparison to Times New Roman are spurious and unverifiable; very seriously type foundries say things this about every single new typeface released.

Frankly, Calibri is an ugly and poorly designed typeface. It is Microsoft's Vista-era Helvetica dupe. It is inferior to Times New Roman.

If you're defending Calibri over the most popular typeface of all time, I hope it's (somehow) coming from an aesthetically minded place

picafrost• 7 months ago

This will make much more sense when the US announces its move away from Arabic numerals (too diverse) back to Roman numerals.

indymike• 7 months ago

Reminds me of the Postal Service spending billions to change the logo from a stylized eagle to a... stylized eagle.

nomdep• 7 months ago

I figured the big scandal would be some bloated government contract shelling out millions for Calibri licenses. But nope, turns out the guy just… doesn’t like the font. What an absolute clown show.

reneberlin• 7 months ago

"To serif or not to serif?" that is now a question of our Times.

dboreham• 7 months ago

jurjo• 7 months ago

For a moment I thought it had something to do with "Cuadernillos Rubio" [1]. They are small workbooks quite common in Spain for kids to learn how to write. However, the font they use is not Times New Roman...

[1] https://www.amazon.es/-/en/gp/product/8417427627?ref_=dbs_m_...

anonym29• 7 months ago

Glad my government continues to work hard on solving the important problems that affect real people like me.

stevetron• 7 months ago

Which Times does Rubio want: There's a NY version, and a Chicago version.

I got politely informed to not use NYTimes font in a paper I turned-in when I was in college. On that occasion, it was an accident. I'd taken the file to school to print, and my owiginal font selection had been replaced by the default. My professor merely said that it is hard to read by people with older eyes.

Several years later, I understand. My default font is now set for Liberation Sans. I have trouble reading 'decorative' fonts. For printouts, I use Liberation Mono.

Thorrez• 7 months ago

Are you saying there are multiple fonts named "Times New Roman"? I can't seem to find any reference to this online.

ecopoesis• 7 months ago

Today is a good day to learn about Nazi Germany's Normal Type Decree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwabacher#History

mgkimsal4• 7 months ago

Make Arial Great Again

queuebert• 7 months ago

I'm glad to see that a government elected by rural, blue-collar workers is tackling the issues those workers care most about.

woliveirajr• 7 months ago

And now I know why the default font was changed in Word. Arg. Don't think I like Times New Roman but it was the recommend font for academic papers in Brazil (and the recommendation still persists).

mathgradthrow2• 7 months ago

Here's the actual memo, in case you want to read it yourself and form your own conclusions:

https://daringfireball.net/misc/2025/12/state-department-ret...

m000• 7 months ago

Good news: At least he didn't order the department to use Computer Modern.

Bad news: Missed opportunity for Fraktur to make a comeback.

Klaus23• 7 months ago

Good, and not because of the diversity drama that the US government wants to shoehorn in here. Any font that makes the uppercase "i" and the lowercase "L" look the same is absolute garbage. Yes, I have a strong opinion about this!

jcalvinowens• 7 months ago

The verbiage in the PR reminds me of a bit from The Night Watch [1]:

[...] and at some point, you will have to decide whether serifs are daring statements of modernity, or tools of hegemonic oppression that implicitly support feudalism and illiteracy

[1] https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1311_05-08_mickens.pdf

Adrock• 7 months ago

Surprised they didn’t go with .

paradox460• 7 months ago

Regardless of the reasons why, I'm glad. I cannot stand calibri. It's one of the ugliest fonts I've ever had to use, somehow looking uglier than even joke fonts like comic sans

benjaminwai• 7 months ago

I am surprised they haven't come up with their own Truth font instead. "Everything is written in Truth".

michaelhoney• 7 months ago

They'll change it to blackletter next

Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri

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