Time(s) for a change: State Division picks a brand new official typeface

Official correspondence from America’s diplomats is getting a little bit of a spruce-up subsequent month. From February 6, the US Division of State will undertake Microsoft’s sans serif Calibri in 14-point measurement “for all paper submitted to the Government Secretariat,” based on The Washington Submit’s diplomacy reporter John Hudson.

large information for font freaks: Occasions New Roman is being phased out on the State Division & changed by Calibri. Secretary Blinken despatched a cable to all embassies right this moment directing employees to not ship him any extra papers with Occasions New Roman. Topic: “The Occasions (New Roman) are a-Changin” pic.twitter.com/HENLbRH3UQ

— John Hudson (@John_Hudson) January 17, 2023

The transfer sparked a considerably tendentious dialogue within the Ars digital workplace earlier right this moment. Within the cable, the State Division refers to Occasions New Roman and Calibri as fonts. However teeeeeeechnically, it ought to have referred to Occasions New Roman and Calibri as typefaces. A font, fairly, is the way you manipulate that typeface—altering the dimensions or weight, the character spacing, or making it italic, for instance.

“If we’re being pedantic (AND I AM!), a font is a clade of a typeface, I feel? And sure, whereas switching typefaces would possibly imply you might be additionally switching the model of textual content you’re utilizing, it’s not a semantically significant phrase,” mentioned a fairly pedantic colleague.

However as a less-pedantic colleague identified, “That is a kind of glasses pushing up issues that individuals who work with all of it ignore regularly.”

A 3rd blamed the confusion on early phrase processors, “which listed totally different typefaces as ‘fonts’ and fonts as ‘font types.'”

Different components of the federal authorities have beforehand expressed preferences concerning typefaces. When you’re submitting a grant to the Nationwide Institutes of Well being, as an example, there are some guidelines and tips on tips on how to format that software.

Nothing smaller than 11-point textual content, not more than 15 characters per linear inch, and not more than six traces per vertical inch are allowed to forestall loquacious investigators from attempting to suit a dissertation into an R01. For typefaces, Arial, Georgia, Helvetica, and Palatino Linotype are really useful however not required—our nation’s main biomedical analysis funding company is ambivalent about serifs versus sans serifs, apparently.

Aesthetics weren’t the first cause for this transformation. In The Washington Submit, Hudson writes that “[t]he secretary’s determination was motivated by accessibility points and never aesthetics, mentioned a senior State Division official conversant in the change.” Sans serif typefaces are simpler to learn than their extra baroque kinfolk, significantly on a display. Moreover, sans serif fonts are much less more likely to create issues for individuals who want to make use of optical character recognition and text-to-speech instruments.

Calibri is a comparatively new typeface, arriving on the flip of the century from Dutch kind designer Lucas de Groot. In 2007, it changed Occasions New Roman because the default typeface for Microsoft Phrase in recognition that, going ahead, most paperwork could be learn on screens fairly than print.

In January, Secretary Antony Blinken directed his employees to discover a extra accessible typeface, and because the default sans serif typeface in Microsoft Workplace, Calibri was clearly interesting. Calibri may not be the default Microsoft Phrase font ceaselessly, although. In 2021 we realized that the corporate was already looking for replacements.