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.

[badasscat]

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?

Interesting...

[CrazyTalk]

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.

Re:Yeah, nice use of taxdollars.

[k98sven]

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!

Re:Not Garamond?

[WillAdams]

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