Slashdot Mirror
US Govt Makes Times New Roman 14 Official Font
pollux03 writes "According to ABC news, 'In an internal memorandum distributed on Wednesday, the department declared "Courier New 12" - the font and size decreed for US diplomatic documents for years - to be obsolete and unacceptable after February 1.
"In response to many requests and with a view to making our written work easier to read, we are moving to a new standard font: 'Times New Roman 14'," said the memorandum. ' The report goes on to cite a few exceptions to the rule including official telegraphs."
Instead of actually doing something useful, they sit around and argue over the right font to use.
Dear God.
SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/ Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618
US State Department
I guess RTFA is too much to ask on a slow news day.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
From the article: "a 'more modern' font."
I'm sure glad they put "more modern" in quotes, as Times New Roman was introduced in 1932!
-Peter
Verdana and Tahoma are screen fonts. Georgia, Times, Arial are print fonts.
Sorry, but not true. Both Verdan and Tahoma are sans serif fonts, whereas Times New Roman is a serif font. A very common guideline for readability is that body text should use a serif font; sans serif fonts are better for titles.
Actually, the typically available Times New Roman has lining figures which are an ``en-space'' wide.
If one types _just_ numbers things line up as if one were using a monospaced font. The problem is the default space (I checked TimesNewRomanPS YMMV w/ other versions) is half an en-space, so that even if one sets up the typesetting to not vary the space, one has to double up on the spaces. Naturally, people should just use tabs properly, but.....
Microsoft has focused their OpenType work on linguistics, not typesetting capabilities, so the above should hold even for Windows 2000 and later (naturally it doesn't hold if someone is using Adobe InDesign and sets the option for old-style figures and proportional numbers).
For those who're curious, I touch on some of this sort of thing in some of my didactic typography samples available from my website URL.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Serif fonts have been found to be more readable in printed material.
Times New Roman is owned by Monotype Corporation.
There's a ``gentleman's agreement'' w/ Linotype Corporation which allows them to use / produce ``Times'' (For the backstory on this, look up an article published in the APHA's journal and Walter Tracy's wonderful book _Letters of Credit_).
However, URW did a clone of Times (Nimbus Serif, I believe it's provided as), which they've since made freely available (see the link to this at www.tug.org) and which can be easily used in free systems such as TeX, and is readily installable w/ XFree86 so that one may use it w/ Linux, Gnome, KDE &c.
For those who're curious on the specifics of typeface copyright &c., www.typeright.org is a good starting point.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Heck.. have you ever watch CSPAN? They should rename that channel C-Geezer... congress if full of old farts... Their eye sight is bad. I'm sure it's the same the farther up the chain in the State Department you go. It's all OLD people. There aren't any 25 year old perfect-sighted guys in upper management in the government. They need big fonts!
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
See here's the problem. 10 point at 96 DPI and 10 point at 72 DPI *SHOULD* be the same thing, point does *NOT* equal pixel, that's a common fallicy propogated by Microsoft. Points are Points, there are 72 of them in an inch. Points are NOT pixels!
So to answer your question. No, 12 point is the accepted standard for most communication. Unfortunately since the majority of computers in the world render points incorrectly '10 point' has become a defacto, and typographically incorrect, standard.
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
Serif fonts offer increased readability for native English speakers. People who have picked up English as a second language do better with sans serif fonts.
A fixed width font like courier (new) is horrible to read when printed on paper. It's great for code or such things, not for actual documents.
A font like Times New Roman was developped specifically for newspapers. It has a serif, which improves readabilty by guiding your eyes acros the lines. It has a relatively high size of such letters as a,e,o,m,n when compared to l,k,j,g. (Sorry I'm not familiar with the correct terms in english) This is done to effectively enlarge the appearance and thus readability. It has large thick vs. thin contrasts. All this is done to improve readabilty in a newspaper: narrow collumn width, small size.
It is even designed to compensate (or use) the effect of overprint: a small amount of ink allways flows out, making the thinnest parts of characters less thin.
When printed on a laserprinter, the font actually becomes a bit to contrast rich in thick/thin, because of the lack of overprint.
Times New Roman is far from the best choice in my opinion. It's outdated (not really suitable for laserprinting). It's not meant to be used as 13 pt font in documents with long lines.
A lot of people underestimate or are even completely ignorant to the influence of document layout: font, size, pagemargins. If you value the readability it's worth it to invest some time in the subject.
-- Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
The point size of a font refers to the height of the ancient lead type, where every letter is sitting on a rectangular piece of lead. Some fonts are designed to never reach the borders of that rectangle, i.e. a parenthesis "(" in a 12-point font can actually be a bit less than 12 pt high. Only if a "(" is more than the specified 12pt, then something is really wrong.
Furthermore, 12 points are NOT the same as 1/6 inch. There are actually 72.27 (American printer's) points in an inch, but someday, Adobe decided that for digital typesetting, a round number such as 72 points per inch was easier. (The number 72.27 pt/in is easy to remember, but that is pure coincidence. See point units.)
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
A few folks have a contrary opinion on the use of Verdana and fixed font sizes when applied to the web:
A popular article on the differences in designing for printed media and the web at Web Pages aren't Printed on Paper. Check out the global comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets for further resources.
Isn't [Wingdings] the crypto that SCO used in their code comparisons?
No, that was Symbol, which any bilingual English/Greek speaker can read fluently. So now, under the DMCA and Patriot Act, are all residents of Greece who know English "terrorists"?
I find this interesting.
Ask anyone in the publishing industry, and chances are they will tell you that the most readable font available is Courier (in any standard variety) 12pt Regular.
I.e., precisely the font they are moving away from, on the grounds of readability.
I wonder if the person who made this choice is someone who has to read a lot of documents, or just somebody who thinks a proportional font looks nicer?
'STOP' doesn't end a line, it's used in place of a period because telegrams don't have punctuation. Or capitalisation. So your message would read:
dear senator stop please consider the following things that should be changed stop the riaa stop microsoft stop the war in iraq stop the patriot act stop no stop stop i mean seriously stop it now stop
The point about impact is very true, though.
Actually, no, a point isn't / wasn't always 1/72nd of an inch.
That was set by John Warnock (you may know him better as the founder of Adobe Systems) when he wrote a little program called PostScript. He chose to do this for efficiency's sake since he knew all fonts would have to be re-created for use in his system.
Prior to that there were two different types of points, English points (72.27 to an inch) and Cicero / Didot points (some funny number to a meter).
So, when one specs points in publishing, one should always ascertain whether one means the DTP point (72 to an inch), or Printer's points or something else.
The original Mac OS set the screen dpi to be 72 pixels per inch, but Apple hasn't made a screen which matches that for a long while AFAIK. Windows sets the default logical screen dpi to 96 by default, but allows one to change it. Unfortunately a lot of programs are Mac ports which are hard-wired to 72 dpi, so it's actually better to set to that.
For those who need more on this, I'd suggest www.schaedler-rulers.com --- also look up Victor Eijkhout's spiffy TeX ruler (should be on CTAN).
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Nice history on Times Roman and Times New Roman here
Alex
Heisenberg may have been here
If you'll RTFA, you'll find "The new font 'takes up almost exactly the same area on the page as Courier New 12, while offering a crisper, cleaner, more modern look'". In fact, it takes slightly less paper, and anyone with half a brain can tell you it's a lot more readable. Add to that that it comes standard with Windows, and there's really no argument against it.
I'd expect Times 14 to put about as much text as Courier 12 on the same page: Courier is monospace, while Times is quite compact.
Of course, I was hoping for a nice font; calson, newspaper gothic, or somesuch. Or my personal favorite: bembo.
I think fonts are some of the most important and pervasive branding statements you can make: think of apple and their use of garamond condensed.
Test it out, loud mouth.
Open a new Word (or other word processor of choice) document and paste in multiple pages of text and format it all as Courier New 12 pt. Print it out.
Now convert it all to Times New Roman 14 pt and print it out. How many pages compared to Courier? The same or less, I'll bet you find.
Courier New is a monospaced font, you can fit a fixed number of characters per line, whether they are all i's or m's.
Times New Roman is properly kerned so that you can fit more characters per line as each character takes up only as much space as it needs.
It sounds like 14 pt would take up more space, and if you stay within one typestyle you would be correct, but Courier New is not space efficient so you actually do gain back more space and make it easier to read large blocks of text.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
Interestingly enough, Times New Roman was first used in the Times of London and probably drawn by Brits Victor Lardent and Stanley Morison, so its origins are decidedly non-American. However, there's been evidence unearthed that Times New Roman was actually originally drawn by American yacht designer Starling Burgess.
For lots of text-on-paper reading, serifed faces are easier on the eyes, so I can see the arguement for Times. Times, though, was intended for newspaper use (hence the name), not long reports that run in wide columns...AS I've said elsewhere, I think something softer and rounder, like Bembo would have been a better choice. FWIW, I specify Verdana in all my site designs, because it's the best web-specific face out there. A lot of my designer geek pals do, too.
From what I heard, the serifs are meant to lead your eyes along the text.
People with dyslexia find the letters in words get jumbled up, so anything that serves to seperate the letters is of help. Hence the preference for sans serif.