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Official correspondence from American diplomats next month is a little more exciting. Starting February 6, the US State Department will use Microsoft’s sans-serif Calibri in 14-point size “on all papers submitted to the Bureau.” Washington Post diplomatic reporter John Hudson.
Big news for font freaks: Times New Roman is being phased out by the State Department and replaced by Calibri. Secretary of State Brinken sent a telegram to all embassies today, instructing staff not to send any more papers to The Times New Roman. Subject: “The Times (New Roman) Are Changing” pic.twitter.com/HENLbRH3UQ
— John Hudson (@John_Hudson) January 17, 2023
The move sparked a somewhat cautious discussion at Ars Virtual Office earlier today. On cable, the State Department calls Times New Roman and Calibri fonts. But technically I had to refer to Times New Roman and Calibri as follows: typefaceRather, a font is a way of manipulating that typeface. For example, change the size, weight, letter spacing, or italics.
“If we’re pedantic (and I am!), do you think fonts are a typeface clade? And yes, switching typefaces also switches the style of the text you’re using.” It is a semantically meaningful phrase, ”said a rather pedantic colleague.
But as a less pedantic colleague pointed out, “This is one of those glasses that pushes up what the people who work with it regularly ignore.”
A third blamed the confusion of early word processors that “listed various typefaces as ‘fonts’ and fonts as ‘font styles’.”
Other parts of the federal government have previously expressed preferences regarding typefaces. For example, when submitting a grant to the National Institutes of Health, there are some rules and guidelines on how to format the application.
Text of 11 points or less, 15 characters per inch or less, and 6 lines or less per vertical inch are permitted to prevent chatty researchers from trying to fit their papers into R01. For typefaces, Arial, Georgia, Helvetica, and Palatino Linotype are recommended but not required. The major biomedical research funding agencies in the United States apparently have ambivalent ideas about serifs and sans serifs.
Aesthetics were not the main reason for this change. In The Washington Post, Hudson wrote:[t]The secretary’s decision was motivated by accessibility concerns, not aesthetics, said a senior State Department official familiar with the change, for people who need to use optical character recognition and text-to-speech tools. create a problem.
Calibri is a relatively new typeface, created at the turn of the 20th century by Dutch type designer Lucas de Groot. In 2007, it replaced Times New Roman as the default typeface in Microsoft Word. This is because we recognize that in the future most documents will be read on screen rather than printed.
January, Secretary Antony Blinken Directed staff to find more accessible typefacesAs the default sans-serif typeface for Microsoft Office, Calibri was decidedly appealing. However, Calibri may not be the default Microsoft Word font forever. In 2021, we learned that the company is already looking for replacements.
