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."

Comments

Re:Yeah, nice use of taxdollars.

[pointbeing]

I work for the federal government. Since not every federal employee can be trusted not to use a magenta scribble font for official correspondence, there needs to be a standard.

Sad, but true.

Also, most large corporations have a standard font for official correspondence.

Re:Yeah, nice use of taxdollars.

[lobsterGun]

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.

Re:Copyright?

[WillAdams]

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

10 Point Falisy

[Genady]

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.