Times New Roman is being phased out at the State Department, replaced by Calibri
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“correspondence between headquarters and overseas embassies, known as Diplomatic Notes, for years had to be accompanied by a legal-size (8 1/2-inch by 14-inch) cover sheet. That wasn't really a big deal when the notes were drafted on typewriters. But Ted Strickler, head of State's Office of Foreign Missions, found that since the introduction of the desktop computer, his employees were spending a lot of extra time formatting the notes and fiddling with the paper in the printer. He checked to see whether he could use standard 8 1/2-inch by 11-inch paper for the Diplomatic Notes, instead. He was told to submit a formal action memorandum suggesting the change. Strickler submitted the suggestion to his superiors in January 1999. A year went by. He found out his action memorandum had been lost, so he resubmitted it. In early 2001-two years after he recommended the change in the first place-the department approved the use of standard paper. "If anything so innocuous as changing the size of the paper for Diplomatic Notes was so exceedingly difficult, how difficult would it be to make more important changes?" Strickler says.“
Closest I can find is his concept of "First Order Retrievability"
Maybe, instead of attributing the quote to someone who said it, they attributed the quote to someone who they'd think would've said it.
- A3 is (within physical tolerances, anyway) twice the size of A4
- A5 is half the size of A4
- A0 is the biggest size and and has an area of 1 square meter, although it is not a square but instead it has an aspect ratio of 1:sqrt(2) (technically all A-series papers have this aspect ratio because math says it is the aspect ratio that retains itself when halved)
- In practical sense, A5 is the smallest pre-packaged A-series paper that I have personally encountered, although I guess someone would chime that they handled A6 (half of A5) or smaller.
I never knew this, but that's awesome. Thanks for the info!
Someone told me a horror story about a PhD thesis rejected because it has wrong margins (probably something about the margins of the document and additional margins added by the driver). He has to reprint all the copies. Most universities are not so stupid, but if your university is stupid enough, remember to triple check the margins.
My personal ETD "hilarity": there is/was a bug in Adobe Acrobat that caused the font I set my dissertation in to glitch/look jagged at exactly 100% zoom. If you shifted to 99.7% or 100.1%? It re-rendered and looked perfect. Only on Acrobat. Not in Chrome or Firefox or Preview or Foxit or anything else. I had to change the font for ETD to accept my document.
Changing the font doesn't sound like a big deal, and in principle it's easy to do, but it means none of the figures match the main text. The line breaks are now totally different, so those typeset line-endings and paragraphs that were rephrased to avoid awkward hyphenations? All gone.
For that and a few other more important reasons, I have two versions of my dissertation. There's the one hosted by ETD, and the one that I actually share and use professionally.
This generally happens not because anyone actually cares about the paper size, but because some employee has a target to 'process 5 applications per day, and then you can go home.' If an application is made on the wrong size paper, thats an insta-deny, and the employee just saved themselves an hour!
It won't fit in binders, envelope, storage boxes or tab folders.
It's asking for trouble, rejection is likely.
This has the great advantage of allowing documents to be easily up and down-scaled on a photocopier - i.e. an A3 document can be printed at 50% scale on an A4 sheet.
I wonder if anyone ever tried to do something similar with imperial units (AKA English units to the US Americans) - i.e. create sheets of papers with side-length of sqrt(2) : 1, and the largest being 1 square yard or similar.
This specifically is what allows easy up-/downscaling for an A* size.
An A1 sheet can fit 4x A3 posters, 8x A4 pages or 16x A5 flyer/booklet pages without any wastage, so all you need is a single A1 printer.
ANSI A == 8.5 x 11 inches (letter)
ANSI B == 11 x 17 inches
ANSI C == 17 x 22 inches
ANSI D == 22 x 34 inches
ANSI E == 34 x 44 inches
There are additional sizes frequently used in the US too: business card, legal, half letter, and specialized sizes for architecture.
17/11 = 34/22 = 1.55
These have the property that they alternate aspect ratios every size, so you have to go up two sizes (4x area) to get back to the original aspect ratio.
The first one, 9 x 12, happens to also be “ARCH A” but I haven’t seen a fancy name for the others.
I've never heard an American complain that Coca Cola is sold by the liter. There's no moral component to Americans not wanting to switch to metric. It's simply a matter of the switch and retooling being more hassle than continuing to use American customary units. Frankly, the difference seems to bother Europeans a lot more than it bothers Americans.
Nobody. Cares.
At the end of the day, the one you’re used to is the one that makes more sense. There is no system that is objectively better “in all situations.”
Most people that strongly argue that one is better than the other are usually just saying “it’s better cuz I’m used to it”
Again, nobody, anywhere that I'm aware of, is sitting around insisting for imperial units as a matter of principle. We just don't care. We use and learn metric where we use it (all the sciences, chemistry, physics, etc in American schools are taught in metric). And we use imperial where we use it, mostly in daily life. And it's perfectly fine.
For example, I personally prefer grams (more because of weight, but still preferred to ounces) to cups (volume) in recipes because it removes density as a variable (a packed cup of flour vs a loose cup of flour)
"Everyone" in what scope? For an international team of engineers and scientists, the answer is obviously metric. But if "everybody" in the relevant context is other tradesmen in America, then "everybody" agrees on the American customary units. It doesn't matter to the latter what the former pick.
But C/F makes absolutely no difference in understanding the weather. Or cooking temperatures. Apart from measuring body temperature and possibly controlled lab environments, there is no situation in life where you need to break temperatures into 1/10 units or benchmark the weather on the boiling/freezing temperatures of water at sea level (I'm talking about the population at large, not meteorologists).
Miles/KM make absolutely no difference in understanding the distance you need to drive somewhere. The fact that a KM is 1000m does nothing to help you understand that the neighboring city is 40 miles (or 64km, or 64,000m) away.
Inches/MM make no difference when I'm doing woodworking. Although, again, no doubt doing the math is easier in mm than adding/removing fractions for inches.
My point is that, one can agree with the simplicity and standardization of the metric system (and I love its consistency) and also argue that it makes no difference in daily life.
There is, it's just that Americans are happy to overlook it here and there for completely arbitrary reasons.
Show me the evidence. Where are these Americans sincerely claiming that metric is immoral?
Probably because European consume a lot of content from the US which makes little sense to them
* The cost of changing over is astronomical
* Domains where the metric system is actually better use the metric system
* Domains where it does not don't need it.
* You have a supercomputer on your wrist. Dividing by a number other than 10 is not such a challenge anymore.
* A4 paper is in no way superior to letter. It's just a choice.
Replacing American exceptionalism with European exceptionalism (usually because of someone's trip when they were in college) is not necessarily always an improvement.
ISO 216 isn't specifically European. It's used in most of the world. The same is true of the metric system.
The world will indeed be incrementally better when people don't have to waste time converting measurements when operating between the US and elsewhere.
Also the metric system is European in origin. Despite what chapter 0 of every science book implies god did not invent it.
All of that and it is still the case that the primary system in the US is the metric system de jure if not de facto. De facto, the metric system is virtually universal in science domains in the US.
Whether the metric system is "better" or not is not the question. There are keyboard layouts not actually designed to slow down typing, but it's just one of those things that most people don't see worth changing. Are they wrong? In that case, it's an individual valuation. I'm sure "the US economy is losing $500b because of QWERTY" would make great copy on a slow news day on reddit. But unless it costs <$500n to make the change, we aren't actually losing anything.
Not everyone is a relentless optimizer. Even some of us who are also like to optimize for the entire system, including transaction costs/overhead/maintenance and not just some ab initio declaration of right like god in genesis.
The US has a great solution that everyone hates because it's the US: we use metric where it's necessary and leave it alone everywhere else. We could use a lot more European know how in numerous other sectors. I would even go so far as to say it's probably correct to presume that things where the US is the outlier is a case where we are the ones doing it wrong.
It's a presumption, meaning evidence can rebut it. In this case, here we can manage both. We can teach both in schools, we can use computers and calculators to divide by numbers other than 10 (which you have to do with mixed units and constants in metric calculations anyway). In fact, I wonder if there's proof that all of this extra teaching and double system overhead is worth what it costs! I bet the answer is that it is though and as long as you can experiment and find out in your domain, it sounds great to me. Different systems for the win!
Of all of the things that are broken about the US, everyone here wants to fix the one thing that's not: our ambidexterity with units. Every school child learns both. We're terrible at raising kids to be bilingual, but we manage to teach them both metric and imperial units.
Once you concede that the metric system is already in de jure use in the US and in de facto use in domains where it's best to use it, you lose all kinds of benefit from switches. The low hanging fruit has been picked. You're left with empty non-empirical arguments like ... ummm... it's better to use one system. It is! But we're not starting from scratch.
Seriously, of all of the things I have posted on HN none has gotten more downvotes than saying that we don't need to go 100% metric in the US, I could speculate as to why, but it sure seems like this is some kind of nerd anti-normie shibboleth. It shouldn't be.
Go ahead, look up the figures. Then decide if it's still worth it to you. If it is, then try and convince enough policymakers not to just support it as the US does but to change everything over. You won't win that war. There has to be some specific need for the change.
'It would be cool' or 'it soothes my OCD' or whatever aren't enough to change something this massive.
Most problems it's a dodge to say "the money is better spent on X" but when you're talking about significant fractions of GDP that's just not how it is. We could do so much to improve people's lives with these sums of money.
Reminder that this is all about the US government internally sticking with letter sized paper. A4 paper is still A4 when measured in inches (which can be done exactly since inches are defined in terms of meters).
The use of SI units is likely measured in centuries. You'll be fine, and you might save a few rockets, rollercoasters and planes here and there:
As is quite a lot of American culture. Lots of good European ideas got improved on by America. Do one more ;-)
- Celsius temperatures near any Fahrenheit article/post/news.
- The metric system. Just scale up and down by ten. You already do it with dollars. So consider it done.
- ISO 6801 dates. Year, month, day. Things scale down logically. Years are composed of months; and months, of days. Also, they would be no ambiguity issues.
There are many domains where imperial units have a nice human scale that makes sense, and then there are others where it is total trash and useless. I still fail to see what's so terrible about using both.
as opposed to the cost of not changing over, which is much larger but paid in small increments over time so nobody is bothered enough to do anything about it
Furthermore, the names of the units are from the imperial system, even if the definitions themselves are not.
The names of the units are from the winchester system which is what predated both US customary units and Imperial units.
At least insofar as being defined in terms of metric units, the statement you replied to was accurate for both imperial and customary.
How difficult was it to change the size? Getting the official requirement changed was difficult; what would have happened if he hadn't bothered and had just started sending everything on normal paper?
It's not like this is a hard problem to solve more than adequately with open and more accessible alternatives.
[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=dyslexia%20arial%20font...
High-definition screens (such as the iMac retina display I'm looking at presently) and many e-ink devices hit 200+ dpi (200--300 is not uncommon for e-ink), which is the starting point for many laserprinters, though those can go to 600--1200 dpi. Monchrome vs. colour will show some distinction in clarity (monochrome effectively has about 3x greater resolution in displays given three-colour picture elements (pels).
My own experience is that I much prefer serif to sans-serif fonts for any substantial reading, though labels and titles may read better in a sans font.
State's decision here seems quite flawed.
Given that Calibri is Microsoft Office's default font ...
... and that Mobile has vastly overtaken Desktop in number of devices (by roughly an order of magnitude) ...
... then it may well be that both Microsoft and the State Department are optimising for reading on mobile. Which could be defensible, I suppose.
Though a far better practice would be to adopt a flexible document standard (say, ePub or HTML, though they're of course not unrelated), which will then adapt to appropriate media characterstics and, say, display in a sans font on small mobile devices and serif in print or large, high-def devices and displays.
(Note that "large" and "high definition" are not necessarily identical: a projection display is large but often not especially high definition. Likewise public signage and the like.)
Edit: As this 2012 NNGroup (Jakob Nielsen) suggests: in "Serif vs. Sans-Serif Fonts for HD Screens". Though the piece notes that with high-definition displays of 200 dpi and above reasons to avoid serif-based fonts are mooted, there's still no clear argument for them either:
Almost all mainstream printed newspapers, magazines, and books use serif type, and thus people are more accustomed to reading long texts in this style. However, given the research data, the difference in reading speed between serif and sans serif is apparently quite small. Thus, there's no strong usability guideline in favor of using one or the other, so you can make the choice based on other considerations — such as branding or the mood communicated by a particular typographical style.
<https://www.nngroup.com/articles/serif-vs-sans-serif-fonts-h...>
(I note that as a strong fan of serif-based fonts for long-form works myself.)
Anecdotally, the most pressing concern I made to management during my career only ever made its way up two levels in the corporate ladder, not including my manager. I have a feeling the State Department is even more rigid with communication flow.
This is amongst the few defensible rationales I can conceive of. The OCR argument offered in the Birdsite thread seems ... weak at best.
(As I've noted in another comment.)
Nobody at the State Department is diving into the intricacies of font licensure.
I'm saying that a decision should be made by weighing pros/cons by someone qualified to make them. If that's HN-y, then that sounds great.
It doesn't sound like how you described this process is anything short of incompetence or "phoning it in". Which, I'm sure is a valid explanation for how they ended up deciding it. But, I'm using the word "dumb" in not a literal sense. It covers both incompetence and laziness.
Also, if you are deciding on a font to be used widely. One of the key aspects is exactly the license. It describes the conditions for its use. If your job is to evaluate which fonts to use, and you don't consider the conditions for its use, then yes, you are incompetent in that decision. And its not "intricate", its the bare minimum expected.
I agree with others on here, though. Everything our government does, and produces, from an IT/development perspective which is not a "competitive advantage" (security, etc.) should be open. Why there would be an official directive to choose a non-open font when so many open fonts exist, is beyond me.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20445911.2011.5...
"Sans serif, monospaced and roman font styles significantly improved the reading performance over serif, proportional and italic fonts."
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/2513383.2513447
and here a whole book about that question
I, for one, think all State Dept cables should henceforth be transmitted in Comic Sans, so as to provide maximum accessibility.
The classic serif fonts cannot be rendered correctly at low DPI not only due to their serifs (which must be enlarged at low resolutions, to avoid their disappearance; this transforms all classic serif typefaces into uglier slab-serif typefaces), but also due to their "contrast", i.e. because they have both thin and thick lines (which are equalized in width at low resolutions, distorting the glyphs). Some of the better modern sans serif typefaces, e.g. Optima, also cannot be rendered correctly at low DPI, due to their variable-width lines.
On high DPI displays, the preference for sans serif or for serif is driven mainly by the familiarity with the tested typefaces, so it is impossible to predict from the results of a half hour test, where the people may see for the first time some typefaces, which of them they would prefer after using them continuously for six months.
[2] It is not pointless to work towards including folks who have a disability. More people than you realize have a form of disability. Ensuring our services and products are accessible is important, whether considered under a legal or an ethical lens.
Ignoring groupings of people who fall under the Disabilities umbrella often can result in lawsuits.
I happen to know this because we ended up needing to rework our training documentation, which we supply as pdfs that were exported from Word. The screen reader needs to figure out the order of the text in the pdf, and by default word can end up exporting the text laid out in a way that causes the screen reader to parse the text out of order. There are accessibility options that can resolve this, but we ended up changing the font since that resolved the problem without needing to ensure the correct options were set everytime someone needs to update the training manuals.
For example, something like this https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/6945...
Seeing a Calibri memo from the state department would make me think that it’s illegitimate.
IBM research used to examine UX. The IBM top brass deciding to pay over $35B+ for a UNIX-like when they have an authentic UNIX of their very own which is going to a boneyard in India suggests that kind of UX research isn't front of mind and funded to decide which font is best.
Calibri is a nice screen-reading typeface. It is likely that "upstairs" reads on a screen, but I wouldn't bet that much on it.
Times New Roman was designed to shove as many letters into a multi-column newspaper page as possible. It's atrocious for anything else, and should be confined to whence it came, print newspapers. It's only the default because it is the default. Good riddance.
For me serif fonts look kind of off and weird. On the other hand monospaced fonts look strangely beautiful to me so I use monospaced fonts on my blog and in other personal writings. I'm guessing that preference isn't biological though, but more likely due to me spending every day reading and writing code. My brain is just best adapted for working with monospaced fonts.
I think about questions like this often when it comes to UI/UX decisions because I think some modern UI/UX is arguably objectively bad in a world where there only exists subjective users. For example, the qwerty keyboard is god awful, but does it make sense for the next Apple Macbook to ship with a dvorak keyboard layout to fix querty's UX issues? Probably not.
I grew up reading books, so I suppose I count as someone who grew up reading serif fonts. I find sans serif fonts to be incredibly difficult to read. They only are a win for small on-screen text since there aren't enough pixels for serifs. I have a sans-serif font for my window titles. Reading more than a single paragraph in sans is fatiguing to me.
I guess us westerners see it a lot because it was much simpler for the manufacturers to just use 1 font file for all the different locales of the gadgets (either the cheapo MP3-player, or the label printer).
It was even there on Windows 3.0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CJK_fonts
INTELLIGENCE REPORT FOR THE PRESIDENT
STATE DEPARTMENT
SECRET/NOFORN
JANUARY 18 2023
CONTENTS: 1. POLITICAL DEVELOPMENTS WITHIN THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION 2. PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA'S NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROGRAM 3. TURKEY AND NATO
Mozilla has a custom font for their branding called Zilla Slab, but I believe that's only serif.
Run `fc-match --all sans-serif` to see how it resolves. On my machine, Noto Sans gets higher priority than DejaVu Sans (though I’ve configured Concourse 4 as the top preference, in ~/.config/fontconfig).
Even worse, a widely-used design doc template here uses a title-only font in the body. I was wondering why it's so hard to read, even for a sans serif font, until I noticed that.
I'd put up a nice sans typeface with single-storey "g" (the double-storey "g" is hard to read for a lot more people than one might think) against a sans-serif any day.
Additionally, I find it hard to discern the difference between 0 and O and I, 1, and l in many sans serif fonts (although the same can be said for some serif fonts).
Wasn't the whole point of Times to be legible when printed at super high speed with super cheap ink on super crappy newsprint?
If you want maximum legibility, would the solution not be a variant of Century Schoolbook which was explicitly designed to be legible?
I had a hard time recently trying to find a scale in inches and tenths and hundredths. It's just easier to user. I'm kinda sorry I sold my drafting equipment.
Even Microsoft is moving on from Calibri!
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/calibri-default-font-microsoft-m...
Musk says it's only 5-10 years away.
/s
Maybe time to trim some fat?