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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."
why so big? isn't 10 the default standard for most written communication?
ed
Who owns the copyright to Times New Roman? Are there any licensing issues involved in this decision?
How much money is this going to cost? Sounds like someone with nothing to do wanted to make himself/herself feel important by changing the official font, all it will do is waste the time (money) of the employees who will now have to check the font settings every time they type something for a while till all their software is switched, or waste time re-printing after realizing "oh shit it's in Courier".
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
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. It doesn't seem that unreasonable.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
This was a memo, not a $3 million case study. Don't overreact just because it has to do with the government. I'll bet you anything this cost about an hour of someone's time and the cost of emailing their workers and handing out some paper copies.
If you want to start bitching about where your tax money is going, do some research first.
Blaze a trail to the New World
So long as they're wasting their time picking out new fonts, they're not writing new laws restricting freedoms, increasing taxes or wasting money on new boondoggle programs.
From the article we can see it is STATE or rather the "US State Department".
As an aside it is nice to see them standardizing on a font that is modern and is just as OCR friendly as courier if not more so. Perhaps soon they will standardize SGML as their across the board typed file format, just as most of the world has for a decade. I do wonder though if 14pt is just a tad too big. Hmm guess it is time to buy some stock in printing supply companies.
Believe it or not, Western Union.com. Mind you, it costs fifteen bucks. But it definitely makes an impact.
There are many versions of Times New Roman out there - Windows has one, MacOS has another (I do know they're different from Windows and pre-OSX MacOS), I believe LaTeX has yet another...
Font fun...
moving from a fixed width/monospaced font to a variable spaced font will make it more difficult for simpler forms of communication to interface officially with government entities.
increasing complexity typically reduces reliability.
Same place one has always gone, Western Union &c.
The problem is, the service is so little in demand in the US that when one sends it, they phone the message in initially, then send the printed copy by mail --- not quite the same effect. YMMV in other countries where the telecommunications system isn't so saturating.
William
(who convinced his brother-in-law to spend a small fortune to send the traditional congratulatory telegram to his father-in-law --- at least he kept it)
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
"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.
this is pretty amazing. back 13 years ago in 1991 i was working for the Army Materiel Command Headquarters and i repeatedly got a "talking to" from my bosses for using Times instead of Courier in official correspondence to other departments. i then went to the head of AMC HQ and suggested a change in policy to allow Times New Roman to also be acceptable, since we were now in the computer age, and not limited to typewriters and daisy-wheel printers, and since Times New Roman was demonstrably easier to read, and more attractive. He took my request to the Chief of Staff of the Army, who shot it down.
i was ahead of my time!
i could live a little longer in this prison
The government seems to be making strides toward adapting to the new technology
I'm sure.
If they're like most corporations in the United States, they'll adopt some official records retention policy that prescribes periodic deletion of old emails and electronic documents.
The Netscape trial illustrated Microsoft's mistake in keeping old emails around.
Monica Lewinsky's old emails likewise proved to be an embarrassment for the administration.
And given Dick Cheney's penchant for secrecy, I'm sure that a lot of historically interesting and relevant emails and documents will be going through an e-shredder in short order.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
(and before I get trolled: no, I can't correct it with glasses)
I have had problems reading small font text for at least 10 years now, and the problem is, of course, getting worse. But I have learned a lot, about the needs of visually impaired people. One of these things is that Verdana is probably the ideal font for us. This fact was discussed in depth on the nystagmus newsgroup, and the good thing is, we all reached a consensus about Verdana.
I am surprised so few companies use it. Actually, none as far as I know. I am surprised mostly because I believe that a nice, readable font is pleasant even for the healthy eye, it's more ergonomic.
Sigged!
TNR is still a bad font for OCR. Serifs are the greatest obstacle to clean OCR reads, especially when the letters run together, as they tend to do in only one generation of photocopying.
At 14 point, however, hoepfully it won't be a problem.
If OCR were a consideration, they should have picked Arial, or some other sans-serif font. (I would recommend Helvetica, but it's not included on the default windows install.)
But no letters with serifs (feet), please!
And you, madam, are very ugly. In the morning, I shall be sober.
Font selection and standardization is a big deal. People read through the process of pattern recognition. Using standard fonts substantially increases the speed at which people read and their comprehension of what they read.
Times New Roman is not a Microsoft v. the world thing. The font was developed by The Times in 1932. It is a relatively compact font. It was used by papers as they were able to get a large number of words per page and was easy to read.
A standardized font improves quality. It makes documents uniform, etc..
Microsoft included Times New Roman because it was a common, standardized font, not the other way around.
Why anyone uses anything besides LaTeX to prepare documents is beyond me. Complete control of glyph composition; astoundingly beautiful and readable styles; PostScript rendering; BibTeX: it's truly the most magnificent thing going.
This is not Microsoft's problem. If you did the minor detail of checking you would see that the Win32 API for selecting a font size takes the size in *points*. The same call takes a negative number to indicate pixels, which appears to be an addition at the last minute in an attempt to allow the DPI to change, but that appears to not have worked due to too many programs using the point interface.
It is true they assumme the screen is 96 dpi so they multiply this by 96/72 to get the number of pixels. There is an internal setting for the screen DPI but changing it will screw up most programs because all the other calls are in pixels.
The exact same bug exists on X, with the addition that screens are (correctly?) set to all kinds of different DPI values. Like GDI32, all other graphics are measured in pixels, which means if your screen is set to a DPI different than the original programmer had, your display is probably messed up. This is why your KDE display suddenly comes up with tiny fonts when you change the X driver. If this DPI was forced to 96 (or 100 which is popular on X) it would solve these problems the same as Windows does.
I have no idea why X, Microsoft, and you all seem to think points are important, especially when every other graphics call measures stuff in pixels. It really would not be hard to have a DPI report from the device and let the program pick the pixel size to match, since they have to do this anyway to draw a 1" square or any other fixed-size graphic.
In any case, there are more visually pleasing fonts, and I see no reason why official documents should not look good. Some organisations use their own custom font, I would have thought that the US government could afford to pay for a real expert to come up with a good one, which might also be more readable by the visually challenged.
You're all missing the point here - Linux as I see it doesn't have the exact font "Times New Roman" as part of the default install - (at least OpenOffice 1.1 on Fedora Core 1 shows now Times Roman font...)
So, what does this edict from the government mean for Linux desktop adoption in the Government?
Well, I guess it is only appropriate that the government waited until the 21st century to abandon a typeface meant to look like a typewriter, in favor of a typeface that is almost synonymous with Microsoft Word.
The choice of 14-point type, too, is interesting: the standard is usually 12 points, but I guess the point size increase is meant to appeal to baby boomers' aging eyes.
For my money, I would have preferred a slightly less stuffy serifed face, like Bembo, or even Goudy. No less official-looking, but rounder and more accessible.
OK, I'd actually have preferred something even more modern, like a sans-serif font such as the emininently readable Gill Sans, but that would be asking too much of the Fed.
Too justify their jobs and the amount of work they do, beaurocrats can probably increase the font to 15 point without much notice. This makes the document longer, ensuring job security by showing how much work they do. Consultants, pay attention here! You can make more money, with less work.
What high school, college or university student hasn't heard of this trick before?
> there are more visually pleasing fonts, and I see no reason
> why official documents should not look good.
Yes, there are more pleasing fonts, but don't let untalented people come any where close to them. Give them Times New Roman and delete all the other fonts from their computers.
At my company, Futura is our corporate branded sans serif, with New Century Schoolbook used for serif work. However, only about 10% of the corporate population can deal with this. We've got people who produce hundreds of pages of Futura text (where its sans serif nature makes the document an eyestrain to read). We've got people who can't tell the difference between Futura, MS Comic Sans, and Arial. We've got people who will mix Futura and Times New Roman in the same freaking sentence. I once saw a marketing person (who should have known better) try to use Zapf Chancery (an abomination) in all caps all over a presentation for a trade show, before he was smacked upside the head.
I can't imagine our Federal government is any better. So, if settling on Times New Roman is the way to prevent font atrocities, then so be it.
Sheesh. The only way I can keep from exploding like this at work is to read Kibo's pages on this.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Really? I thought it was their formulaic and predictable sloganizing that made their branding statement so pervasive.
An administrative office in the US gov't decided to use a different font. Not only is this not news, but for them to frame it as "US Bans old font" is downright misleading and dispicable. Pretty much every office I've ever worked for has had a standard font. The Dept. of State decided to change fonts--and to a much more eye-pleasing one, I might add. Nobody is going to jail for using Courier Font in the USA. Not even a fine. This is basically just a "TPS Report" saying how they're gonna do the cover sheets from now on... new font. No big fucking deal. The USA has not banned any fonts. If you work for the Dept of State, start using Times new Roman. Shoulda been using it years ago anyway. Of course, if the title of the story had been "State Department Chooses New Font" the editors would have laughed the reporter out of the office... so it had to be more dramatic. "US bans..." ... yeh we've banned lots of stupid things that shouldn't be banned, but fonts are not yet one of them.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
so I use the same font. It's freaking HUGE.
But maybe GWB and company will notice when they say "this intelligence is unreliable".
The revolution will NOT be televised.