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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
why so big? isn't 10 the default standard for most written communication?
ed
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.
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?
It's a jobs program, to help out all of the unemployed fontographers, put out of work by the dot-com bust.
"If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for everyone else."
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.
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
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
Sad, but true.
Also, most large corporations have a standard font for official correspondence.
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
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.
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!
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.
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
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...
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
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
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?
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"
(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!
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.
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.