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Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri

(www.reuters.com)
386 points italophil | 1 comments | 10 Dec 25 00:08 UTC | HN request time: 0.251s | source
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dsevil ◴[11 Dec 25 01:42 UTC] No.46226646[source]▶
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.

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rtkwe ◴[11 Dec 25 02:55 UTC] No.46227121[source]▶
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.

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Fnoord ◴[11 Dec 25 05:00 UTC] No.46227855[source]▶
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.

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codechicago277 ◴[11 Dec 25 06:54 UTC] No.46228432[source]▶
Off topic but did you find anything interesting? I spent a few days researching Holodomor and was surprised how poorly understood it still is even today, and badly reported at the time. Good propaganda case study. There’s a dramatic film about the reporting too, Mr. Jones (2019).
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1. vintermann ◴[11 Dec 25 07:36 UTC] No.46228676[source]▶
I haven't researched it explicitly, but I do come across "what happens in the wider world" notices in small historical newspapers and sometimes I search to see what it was about. Saw a mention about some general winning an important victory, searched his name, found out he was one of the whites, and the first thing claimed about him was that he only came in "once the war was already lost".