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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."
There are only three exceptions to the draconian new typographical rules: telegrams, treaty materials prepared by the State Department's legal affairs office and documents drawn up for the president's signature, it said.
As those will all be done in the MS Comic Font.
I had my money on 20 point Dingbat.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Instead of actually doing something useful, they sit around and argue over the right font to use.
Dear God.
SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/ Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618
why so big? isn't 10 the default standard for most written communication?
ed
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
I would think Verdana or Tahoma would be a much better solution. Times New Roman is SOOO Windows 3.1! :)
How appropriate since we are apparently the New Rome .
The word "Oil" is often misintepreted as "Weapons of Mass Destruction" when written in Courier New 12.
Who owns the copyright to Times New Roman? Are there any licensing issues involved in this decision?
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.
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.
Telegrams?! They still use telegrams? If so, where can I still send one from? I'm sure a telegram to a Senator might get more attention than a letter and certainly more than an email. Plus sending telegrams sounds cool.
--Stephen
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
In related news, the US Government changes the official resolution of all desktops to 640x480, 256 colors.
and yet we still do not have an official language!
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
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
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. :)
Believe it or not, Western Union.com. Mind you, it costs fifteen bucks. But it definitely makes an impact.
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.
Seems a little obsolescent.
;)
Or even obsolete!
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
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
Dear Senator. STOP.
Please consider the following things that should be changed. STOP.
-The RIAA. STOP.
-Microsoft. STOP.
-The war in Iraq. STOP.
-The Patriot Act. STOP. No, stop. STOP. I mean seriously, stop it now. STOP.
--Chag
...the department of homeland security recently adopted Zapf Dingbats as its official font.
Should clear up their communiques a bit.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
Times New Roman instead Garamond? What were those aesthetically clueless dingbats thinking?
That's it. I've completely lost faith in our government, and political processes in general. If they can't ascertain Garamond's clear superiority to TNR, well, they'll just have to impeached, that's all.
And sent for serious rehabilitation. And re-training, with those methods used for de-programming cult victims.
I mean, seriously, TNR over Garamond? I ask you...
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?
"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?"
No more ASCII art in official US government memos.
Is that all US government reports now have to have to be accompanied by "the correct cover sheet". Oh, and all White House press conferences must have at least "fifteen pieces of flair".
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
"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 20 point dingbat is actually running the country, so maybe you should collect on your bet.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
In 12pt Courier New, War Was Beginning...
What happen!!
Someone set us up the Times!!
What!!
We get bigger!!
New Font Turn on!!
It's Huge!!
How are you gentlemen!!
All your document are belong to us!!
You have no chance to survive, make your change!!
Join the Free Software Foundation
(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!
Actually, no, a point isn't / wasn't always 1/72nd of an inch.
That was set by John Warnock (you may know him better as the founder of Adobe Systems) when he wrote a little program called PostScript. He chose to do this for efficiency's sake since he knew all fonts would have to be re-created for use in his system.
Prior to that there were two different types of points, English points (72.27 to an inch) and Cicero / Didot points (some funny number to a meter).
So, when one specs points in publishing, one should always ascertain whether one means the DTP point (72 to an inch), or Printer's points or something else.
The original Mac OS set the screen dpi to be 72 pixels per inch, but Apple hasn't made a screen which matches that for a long while AFAIK. Windows sets the default logical screen dpi to 96 by default, but allows one to change it. Unfortunately a lot of programs are Mac ports which are hard-wired to 72 dpi, so it's actually better to set to that.
For those who need more on this, I'd suggest www.schaedler-rulers.com --- also look up Victor Eijkhout's spiffy TeX ruler (should be on CTAN).
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
I think you just realized the real motive. The ink lobby has "donated to the president". Everyone knows how expensive ink cartridges are(or laser). Open Open Office (pun intended) and type something. You will see that the end number of pages is the same, but that Times New Roman 14 uses wider parts of letters (total width same including spacing). You will need to open it up to see what I mean. This will cost the governement millions paying for these extra cartridges. Fear the Ink Lobby!
Mod Wisely.
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.