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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."
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
Sad, but true.
Also, most large corporations have a standard font for official correspondence.
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
Verdana and Tahoma are screen fonts. Georgia, Times, Arial are print fonts.
When I was in the military we were required to use a font called OCR-A. It was optimised for the OCR readers they had at the time (the late 80's early 90's). I was nearly 100% accurate when OCR'd - pretty good when you consider that we were OCRing text that was being produced by typewriters that had been in near constant use for 20 years.
You can see an example of OCR-a it here.
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.)
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
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