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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.
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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.
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.
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?
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.)
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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.
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
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.