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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."
Not to be petty or anything, but just how slow of a news day does it have to be when a font change is considered newsworthy?
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Instead of actually doing something useful, they sit around and argue over the right font to use.
And we sit around arguing over their arguments. Which is worse?
That they are going from a fixed-width font (courier) to a variable-width font (Times). Columns of numbers, etc. won't line up as nice with Times, especially if the people creating the documents don't know what they are doing.
and yet we still do not have an official language!
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
They should have used an open license font like Bitstream Vera. This would have given them the fixed spaced "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono" for tabular data, "Bitstream Vera Serif" for paragraph and "Bitstream Vera Sans" for headers, captions, etc. Simply beautiful and open. :)
The government uses a lot of OCR - more than you would believe. Standardizing on one exact font description makes it far easier to build an OCR engine optimized for speed and accuracy, which in turn saves time and taxpayer dollars.
Wait a second.. are you saying that the government is spending lots of time OCRing their own computer documents??
Now that is a waste of time and money!
They chose the Times New Roman typeface at 14 point, consisting of the fonts regular, italic, bold and bold italic.
A typeface could technically be a font if you only have one version of that typeface = the one font in it.
I can think of something you can send your Congresscritter from WesternUnion.com that would have almost certainly have a greater impact than a telegram.
Convenient that it lets you send both!
The enemies of Democracy are
"I want to make it perfectly clear to every one in the world that just because I'm shortsighted does not mean that I can afford not to be misudnerstood."
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
Now, in the last 10-15 years it's become reasonable to use electronic means to move around large amounts of data between normal sites - that is, those not custom-built around mainframe systems like the original ARPAnet. The government seems to be making strides toward adapting to the new technology, but you have to understand that those giant traditional paper distribution networks can't just be replaced overnight. I'm sure that there are a lot of instances where, at this exact moment in time, it's actually cheaper and more efficient for office "A" to transmit information to office "B" using paper as a carrier medium.
Remember, "Rome" wasn't built in a day (Heh! An on-topic pun! Ain't I the clever one?). It'll take a while to remodel it to suit the current technology.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Unfortunately, Garamond isn't readily available to all systems the government is likely to be purchasing / using, so the choice of Times New Roman (a Windows core font, and available on all Macs which have Internet Explorer installed) makes good fiscal sense.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
You've never had to talk with the customer's PHB about some program spec yet, have you?
;)
The tech stuff is easy. They just want the program to do everything _and_ the kitchen sink.
But what really causes weeks or months of meetings is
- "should the logo in the corner be exactly 120 pixels or 121 pixels?... no, wait, 119 pixels is just right."
- Then the fonts which _must_ be 7 pixel Sevenet (or some other non-standard font which is guaranteed not to even be installed on someone's computer, when they point their browser at the site. Bonus points if it's a pain to read.)
- And it all _must_ comply with some nighmarish corporate scheme that wasn't designed for the net to start with. Actual examples from actual projects I've worked on, include cyan on blue, and light orange on orange-ish yellow. Literally. I'm not making it up.
- And all the text _must_ always be limited into a 491 pixel wide area, to look the same on everyone's screen as it does on the PHB's laptop, with whatever default non-maximized position his IE remained set as. (God forbid that someone who uses 1600x1200 be actually able to use all that area to read the text.)
And so on and so forth. It's the stuff managers' dreams are made of. I'm guessing that if you stopped them from spending weeks debating the exact font size and exact logo size and hue, you'd suck all the fun out of management.
So, well, given that the government's job _is_ to manage... now why am I not surprised?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
And just think of the endless committees, sub-committees, working groups, focus groups, font lobbyists, R and D, marketing and strategising people that were involved. There were probably millions spent on deciding whether they should go for the relaxed 12 point, or the more dynamic and assertive 'hell we're a superpower' 14 point approach.
I hear they're working on rebranding the bald eagle for the 21st Century, apparently the existing bird just isn't - well - [makes feeble hand gestures] swooping enough for today's time-poor, internet-rich, xboxed, click-to-continue, frappacino generation.
Best wishes,
Mike.