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Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri

(www.reuters.com)
386 points italophil | 3 comments | 10 Dec 25 00:08 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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WhyOhWhyQ ◴[10 Dec 25 22:35 UTC] No.46224941[source]▶
Is Calibri actually more accessible? Every step of this story seems pointless and fake.
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ajross ◴[10 Dec 25 22:58 UTC] No.46225199[source]▶
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.
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1. WhyOhWhyQ ◴[11 Dec 25 00:55 UTC] No.46226281[source]▶
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...

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2. shagie ◴[11 Dec 25 03:03 UTC] No.46227167[source]▶
One of the things that image shows is the slightly higher density of the Times version (compare row by row) allowing the paper to put more text on a page and thus reduce some of the costs.

This appears to be done by increasing the height of the lower case letters in the Times side while reducing the height of the capital letters at the same time. This then was also combined with a reduction in the size of some of the serifs which are measured against the height of the lowercase letter (compare the 'T' and the following 'h').

The Times is similarly readable at the smaller font size than the modern serif font - and scaling the modern font to the same density of text would have made the modern font less readable.

Part of that, it appears is the finer detail (as alluded to in the penultimate paragraph) - compare the '3' on each side.

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3. thaumasiotes ◴[11 Dec 25 14:41 UTC] No.46231951[source]▶
> the slightly higher density of the Times version (compare row by row)

I don't think that's the comparison you want to draw? The rows appear to hold very similar amounts of text.

But the rows on the left, in Times New Roman, are shorter than the rows on the right. So even though "one row" holds the same amount of text, one column-inch of Times New Roman holds more rows.

The Times New Roman looks more readable to me because it has thicker strokes. This isn't really an issue in a digital font; you can't accidentally apply a thin layer of black to a pixel and let the color underneath show through.