Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri

If you search for Lucas de Groot (the designer of Calibri) you will get the results displayed in Calibri.

Sadly, it doesn't work with the coolest niche fonts... https://www.google.com/search?q=ibm+3270

Very cool... but I can't seem to get it to do so for other fonts I can think of off the top of my head... Inconsolata, Consolas, Fira Code, etc. "Times New Roman" does work as well.

Would be cool to see google support this for at least all the fonts in Google Fonts' library, since they're already well supported web fonts.

This was super cool - nice little Google easter egg.

I have, many times, hence my earlier comment.

If Rubio read Republic then he's just demonstrated that he'd not have understood it.

·puᴉɯ oʇ ǝɯoɔ ʇɐɥʇ sʇuoɟ ɹǝɥʇo ǝɹɐ ǝɹǝɥꓕ

Maybe when (if?) the Democrats take back the House and Senate in 2026. Right now Congress is solidly right-wing and sees no reason to impeach...nor would a conviction ever happen, even if the trial was held.

> Honestly when are we going to impeach Trump, he's basically the same Hitler.

When did Germany impeach Hitler?

Also, Donald Trump has already been impeached as many times all other Presidents combined.

This is a line from Michael Cain in Austin Powers: Goldmember (2002).

If they wanted to go back to Times, they could have at least looked at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts

Nah, it's ugly and doesn't exude "professionalism" at all. For that you'd need a serif font, or at least a proper sans serif like Helvetica or SF Pro.

Funny how they make this joke about Trump when biden got caught on camera using cue cards and having reporters questions and headshots on a cheat sheet...

From the article:

> ...according to an internal department cable seen by Reuters...

The jab at the DEIA is petty, sure. But if the only intent was to smear them, why didn't they even announce it publicly? It was the choice of Reuters and HN to make an MS Office font change(!) a big deal.

> DEIA, woke, wasteful, and anti-conservative (ie: change).

I translate things like "DEI", "woke" and "anti-conservative" as "basic kindness"

Can you cite a source that Blinken's decision was arbitrary? Because Rubio himself is quoted here as attributing a reason for the change (i.e. that it wasn't arbitrary).

I'm also interested to hear your thoughts on the arbitrariness of Microsoft's decision to switch to Calibri in 2007 - imagine the "fragmentation" that must have caused across the business world!

You seem weirdly worked up over this.

Blinken made no public statements on this until he was asked about it. He did not come out and say for example, "For too long, the vision impaired community have been discriminated against by the systemic bias via the use of Times New Roman. Today we are taking action to change this and restore the dignity of those this font has long oppressed", but Rubio just did exactly this. For all I can tell the actual decision was a recommendation made by an internal team doing an accessibility review.

Sure, this is a good point, but only if you completely ignore the the accessibility gains provided by the change. But I'm guessing rationality wasn't on the menu when this was written.

No, Times New Roman is old fashioned, so moving to something more readable doesn't shock me.

If changing fonts once was a wasteful empty gesture that they used to pat themselves on the back and which didn't benefit anyone, then isn't changing it a second time the exact same thing?

People do have tools to make things more readable. Some of those tools are professionally designed fonts and typefaces which are easier for people with low vision to read.

You sound like someone saying we shouldn’t have ramps and elevators because crutches exist.

> if a person is visually impaired, why wouldn't they have tools at their disposal to make things readable?

If it's on a screen in a browser, probably. If it's printed, or on a display not under a reader's control, probably not.

FWIW, I'm partially split. I generally prefer sans-serif overall - have for decades. I think I slightly prefer serif for some printed material visually, but... when I actually have to engage and read it, for long periods, I think I tend to opt for sans-serif. Noticed this on my kindle years ago, and kindle reader now - I usually swap to sans-serif options (I think it's been my default for a while).

If I were to guess, the switch to Calibri in the first place was because people were able to use the MS default in practice instead of having to hand change it, or use "official" templates, which imo is probably more appropriate anyway.

I think Calibri is arguably a better font, to me the bigger issue is the commercial license used in govt works.

> They haven't. And you really think changing to Calibri benefitted anyone?

The wild thing is that even if you don’t respect the switch to Calibri on the grounds that it doesn’t really benefit anyone and is therefore wasted effort for little or no gain, the decision to switch back is a decision to double that wasted effort.

That said, it’s clear from the daring fireball story linked in the thread that this is being super overblown and Rubio isn’t really making an argument that Calibri is wasting money. This is an arbitrary decision.

Calibri is a tool to make things more readable

It’s only for the department of state though, and the previous cost to change to Calibri was about $145,000 over two fiscal years.

A dollar a doc? Sounds like a sweet job.

This is demonstrably false. Previous administrations have not. It used to be normal to do things like keeping cabinet members appointed by their opponents or not put up a mocking picture of your predecessor in the white house.

Petty as in 'small and does not really matter' or petty as in 'vindictive'. All administrations do many small things that may not ultimately have much impact, but often those may be for benign reasons. Understanding the reasoning behind the decisions would help in determining what kind of 'petty' this is.

Nah, the state department is big enough to do both at the same time - at least it would be at full staffing levels.

Point is they're doing both, at once.

All paragraph text to to use the proper manly IMPACT in the future.

So what next? Wheelchair ramps? Seats for the elderly and the pregnant? Accessibility features don't displace or even inconvenience the majority in any manner. They only make facilities accessible to an additional crowd, who should be getting them as a matter of right in the first place. What's the end game here?

Many things labeled as woke benefit the masses like environmental protection.

I guess people like to stay asleep.

Will be a rough awakening

I'm way past raging—just laughing at the stupidity at this point.

Oh, you're just obsessed with this, aren't you?

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Yes, a true "mask-off moment": I do find that classic LaTeX papers look more trustworthy than whatever MS Word outputs by default.

Associating TNR with authoritarianism would not even be historically accurate, because many authoritarians pushed to simplify writing (Third Reich, Soviets, CCP); if anything, TNR looks _conservative_, which is probably the look that Rubio is going for.

Fasces or fascist?

Marco Rubio famously doesn't have the authority to do what is arguably his job.

> Trump envoy Witkoff reportedly advised Kremlin official on Ukraine peace deal

A more dignified Secretary of State would have resigned when this news surfaced.

> What you actually want to compare [..]

The (ex-)scientist in me is looking for a controlled study, ideally published in a peer reviewed journal, looking at - how can I put this - actual data.

60s of Googling gave me this

The effect of a specialized dyslexia font, OpenDyslexic, on reading rate and accuracy https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5629233/

"A single-subject alternating treatment design was used to investigate the extent to which a specialized dyslexia font, OpenDyslexic, impacted reading rate or accuracy compared to two commonly used fonts when used with elementary students identified as having dyslexia. OpenDyslexic was compared to Arial and Times New Roman in three reading tasks: (a) letter naming, (b) word reading, and (c) nonsense word reading. Data were analyzed through visual analysis and improvement rate difference, a nonparametric measure of nonoverlap for comparing treatments. Results from this alternating treatment experiment show no improvement in reading rate or accuracy for individual students with dyslexia, as well as the group as a whole. While some students commented that the font was “new” or “different”, none of the participants reported preferring to read material presented in that font. These results indicate there may be no benefit for translating print materials to this font."

Advocacy for people with disabilities is important, but actual data may be even more important.

A meaningful testing of the differences between fonts is greatly complicated by the effect of the familiarity with the tested fonts.

The differences between individuals which perform better with different fonts may have nothing to do with the intrinsic qualities of the fonts but may be determined only by the previous experience of the tested subjects with the tested fonts or with other fonts that are very similar to the tested fonts.

Only if you measure reading speed differences between fonts with which the tested subjects are very familiar, e.g. by having read or written a variety of texts for one year or more, you can conclude that the speed differences may be caused by features of the font, and if the optimal fonts are different between users, then this is a real effect.

There are many fonts that have some characters which are not distinctive enough, so they have only subtle differences. When you read texts with such fonts you may confuse such characters frequently and deduce which is the correct character only from the context, causing you to linger over a word, but after reading many texts you may perceive automatically the inconspicuous differences between characters and read them correctly without confusions, at a higher speed.

Many older people, who have read great amounts of printed books, find the serif typefaces more legible, because these have been traditionally preferred in book texts. On the other hand, many younger people, whose reading experience has been provided mainly by computer/phone screens, where sans-serif fonts are preferred because of the low resolution of the screens, find sans-serif fonts more legible. This is clearly caused only by the familiarity with the tested fonts and does not provide information about the intrinsic qualities of the fonts.

Moreover, the resolution of most displays, even that of most 4k monitors, remains much lower than the resolution of printed paper and there are many classic typefaces that are poorly rendered on most computer monitors. To compare the legibility of the typefaces, one should use only very good monitors, so that some typefaces should not be handicapped. Otherwise, one should label the study as a study of the legibility as constrained by a certain display resolution. At low enough display resolutions, the fonts designed especially to avoid confusions between characters, like many of the fonts intended for programming, should outperform any others, while at high display resolutions the results may be very different.

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Cruelty signalling?

Virtue signaling is for liberals. Conservatives prefer shitty human signaling. Eventually folks will take them for their word I hope.

>Microsoft Office (and Windows) changed the default font more than a decade ago.

You're behind. They've since changed it again. Calibri is no longer the default for Microsoft Office, it's now Aptos. That change was a few years ago.

Good question, with a little searching I found that, in true DOGE fashion, there exists an executive order announcing a new "National Design Studio" which is tasked with updating USWDS

So why fonts are being managed by Rubio and not the Chief Design Officer is anyone's guess

https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/08/fact-sheet-pr...

I think the whole US is being DOGED out of existence tbh.

It's really not. The used font just doesn't move the needle regarding the global impression. 99% of people never ever think or care about the font they use.

What else should be decided on on the highest level: spacing, padding, allowance of the Oxford comma?

It is useful that somebody thinks about that stuff, just not the highest level of the government.

That's like the CEO of Microsoft having meeting about coding conventions, space vs tabs, variable name format etc.

You want to know what the global impression of the US is right now? Here's a translated quote from a newspaper today, from a source in our military:

> – The US has the most qualified intelligence organizations in the world at its disposal. Both the CIA and the FBI have been politicized under the current regime. I find it difficult to see how we will be able to maintain the trusting cooperation we have had with the US in the past after this.

The actions of the current administration speaks far louder than any font ever could, and it's tearing down decades of good will and trust.

The Global impression of the US is down the toilet. This only adds to that. I kept being told that I was not American, and America didn't care what the rest of the world thought. Which is it?

Speaking as someone who is not from the US I can say that the global impression of the US is not helped by the secretary of state bikeshedding about fonts. There are important issues of foreign affairs that need thought and attention at this time.

It's an interesting thought, given what current global impressions are.

I'm imagining a scenario in which the President of the United States is doing his usual sort of diplomatic outreach, consisting of waffling incoherently about things he's heard on TV that he doesn't like about their country. At one point he loses his train of thought and starts bragging about how well he's doing in cognitive adequacy tests. The diplomats are waiting until the bit where they get to flatter and bribe him at the end, the bit where he usually reverses his foreign policy, so long as they can get him to understand what they're actually asking from him. One of them speculates whether it's even possible that half the country is actually dumber than this guy.

A staffer wearing a MAGA baseball cap sidles up to them with some briefing notes. And its just impossible not to notice the notes are typeset in the very same venerable font that was once used as the default for Windows 9x.

The diplomats are stunned. No sans serif wokeness here. The typeface exudes heritage and gravitas. At last they realize what a very serious adminstration they're dealing with.

No one cares about the font US documents are written in. You're not that important.

I disabled fonts on the web browser on my computer, in order to avoid that and other problems. I also disabled the display of non-ASCII characters in URLs (which required adding some codes to make it do that; the built-in settings will only work for the domain name and not the rest of the URL), and changed the font used for URLs, which also helps.

Yeah I understand it's an issue other places but I don't think it's actually a significant issue in government documents and forms written in English which is the usecase here. The choice doesn't have to satisfy all requirements it just needs to be a good choice for government writing.

This font can't be promoted enough!

The crossbar of a t is not a serif, but those of the capital I are definitely serifs.

Only on computer screens it is possible to confuse serifs with crossbars, because of the very low resolution, which forces the increase of the width of a serif to 1 pixel, possibly making it as wide as a crossbar.

To convince yourself that capital I has serifs and not crossbars, just look at high-resolution photos of some Roman imperial inscriptions, like that on Trajan's column, which are the gold standard for the design of the capital letters in serif fonts.

Most letters of the Latin script are made of 3 elements, thick lines, thin lines and serifs. The width ratio between the thick lines and the thin lines is called the contrast of the font.

Serif fonts normally have a higher contrast and sans serif fonts not only have no serifs, but they also have no contrast or only a low contrast.

Serifs are even thinner than the thin lines (which include some of the crossbars), except in sans serif fonts (which have no serifs) and slab serifs fonts (where the serifs are as thick as the thin lines).

Both the sans serif and the slab serif fonts are fonts typical for the 19th century after the Napoleonian wars, when they were used mainly for advertising, where they attracted attention due to their anomalous serifs and they also allowed a lower cost by using cheap paper and printing machines, which would not have rendered well the standard serif fonts.

In several programmer fonts, where most characters are sans serif, a few characters are made slab serif, i.e. with serifs that are as thick as a crossbar, with the purpose of distinguishing them clearly from similar characters. Thus capital I is made with thick serifs looking like crossbars, even if that is not the standard capital I shape. The reason is less to distinguish it from l, which should have a low hook even in sans-serif typefaces, but to distinguish it better from vertical bar, which is important in programming languages.

Moreover, because such programmer fonts are fixed-pitch, a few narrow characters have slab serifs that do not exist in variable-pitch fonts, in order to avoid excessive areas of white space between letters. Such slab serifs added for blackening are put at the top of the small i, j and l letters, not only on capital I (but on the small letters the slab serifs are unilateral, not bilateral, like on capital I). Such extra slab serifs on the narrow characters are inherited from the type-writing machines, where they had the purpose to diminish the pressure of the hammer hitting the paper, to avoid making holes in the paper.

Down-modded by an obscurity apologist.

That's the "diversity" they were talking about?? Fucks sake.

Nope, just Kim Jong one (in French).

> Yeah because normal people never have to deal with alphanumeric strings...

Natural language tends to have a high degree of disambiguating redundancy and is used to communicate between humans, who are good at making use of that. Programming languages have somewhat less of disambiguating redundancy (or in extreme cases almost none), and, most critically, are used to communicate with compilers and interpreters that have zero capacity to make use of it even when it is present.

This makes "letter looks like a digit that would rarely be used in a place where both make sense" a lot more of a problem for a font used with a programming language than a font used for a natural language.

No, because normal people can read "l00l" as a number just fine and don't actually care if the underlying encoding is different. AI won't care either. It's just us on-the-spectrum nerds with our archaic deterministic devices and brains trained on them that get wound up about it. Designing a font for normal readers is just fine.

> Capital "i"s without crossbars aren't capital "i"s. They're lower-case Ls. Any font that doesn't recognize this should be rejected.

You have asserted this at least thrice in the past thirty minutes. What makes you feel so strongly about it? "Rejected" for what purpose? Do you understand that you've just trashed Helvetica, to take a famous example?

I don't think you understand how gov spends money lol.

What you think is "next to nothing" will 99% turn into $300 million dollars and 10 years later about $4 billion will have been spent.

And 100% there are people waiting to milk the gov doing this. Maybe you are one of them? In that case...

I cross my sevens, slash my zeros, and use a hook on lowercase T to avoid confusion with plus signs. I think I developed the hook-T habit in college math classes.

That's good, because the "O" should never be dotted. You use slash OR dot for zero, unless you vaguely remember them both as useful for disambiguating but forgot that both marks are for zero and vary by typeface. Mostly dotted zero was just during the dot matrix era. I wouldn't mind being shown counter examples.

I cross my sevens!

I'll consider starting to slash my zeros. Seems legit.

It's a ligature in modern English, but it's a proper letter in Anglo-Saxon.

Ligatures or contextual letter variants (such as s being written with a different symbol when it's at the end of a word) are a sin to encode as characters. They should be part of the presentation layer, not the content layer! And don't even get me started on OCR which thinks such things are good to "preserve".

> The default font shouldn't be about aesthetics, it should be first and foremost about usability.

The thing about usability is that it's both objective and subjective, and one can argue that aesthetics is part of usability. For example, I find writing code much more pleasant with Comic Code font, and I can imagine that there are other people that would hate it.

Off topic but did you find anything interesting? I spent a few days researching Holodomor and was surprised how poorly understood it still is even today, and badly reported at the time. Good propaganda case study. There’s a dramatic film about the reporting too, Mr. Jones (2019).

> For aesthetic or other preferences you change the default font to whatever you please.

Ever tried changing the font of a printed document? Or a PDF?

Many people with MS get diplopia, and so need prismatic lenses to help with the double vision.

serif vs sans serif is not "a vague aesthetic reason", it's the most fundamental typeface choice you can make, moreso than monospace (which is an artifact of some 19th century technology) Rubio is an attorney, and there are many stylistic conventions in the legal and judicial space, why ruffle those feathers by flouting them? if you are given a style guide for your PhD thesis, do you follow it or do you futz endlessly with the fonts to show them what an independent thinker you are?

Does it matter? There are multiple instances of this admin murdering people.

Times New Roman existed in 1950. Your comment does not in ANY way contest the parent comment.

Yeah, we all thought the fascists at least would be stylish when they came.

No, it’s all just fake gold and baseball caps.

I don't have link on that, but the main difficulty with OCR isn't the OCR part (not anymore at least), it's the "clean up" part, and serifs are a pain in the ass, especially on sightly crumpled paper. My use case was an ERP plugin that digitalized and read to receipt to autofill reimbursement demands, and since most receipt use sans-serif fonts, it was mostly fine, but some jokers use serifed font (mostly on receipts you get when using cash, not credit card receipts) and the error rate jumped from like 1% to 13% (not sure about the 1%, it might be a story i told myself to make me feel better, it was a decade ago, before i pivoted to network from AI. I always take the best decision it seems)

I don't know what studies Blinken's State Department considered, but here are 2 studies on the matter.

https://www.academia.edu/72263493/Effect_of_Typeface_Design_...: "For Latin, it was observed that individual letters with serif cause misclassification on (b,h), (u,n), (o,n), (o,u)."

https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10220037: [Figure 5 shows higher accuracy for the two sans-serif fonts, Arial and DejaVu compared to Times New Roman, across all OCR engines]

The memo at the time said the serifs can cause OCR issues.

https://x.com/John_Hudson/status/1615486871571935232

printed documents, images, horribly inaccessible pdfs, horribly inaccessible websites

We have a process at work where clients export information from their database as a pdf which they email to us so that we can ocr it and insert into our database.

No one else seems to think this is bat shit insane

One of the things that image shows is the slightly higher density of the Times version (compare row by row) allowing the paper to put more text on a page and thus reduce some of the costs.

This appears to be done by increasing the height of the lower case letters in the Times side while reducing the height of the capital letters at the same time. This then was also combined with a reduction in the size of some of the serifs which are measured against the height of the lowercase letter (compare the 'T' and the following 'h').

The Times is similarly readable at the smaller font size than the modern serif font - and scaling the modern font to the same density of text would have made the modern font less readable.

Part of that, it appears is the finer detail (as alluded to in the penultimate paragraph) - compare the '3' on each side.

“I want a new font so it’s easier to read” isn’t neutral?

But if you go around and tell everyone you meet that they're doing it wrong and that lasagna MUST be prepared exactly the way you do it, because it's the one and only right way, then you're a lasagna-nazi :)

That's still using their other culture choices to manufacture a problem with producing consistency in typeface. It's a stretch. Any good (don't take this out of context, please) leader will settle these kinds of trivial internal disputes and move onto important problems.

While you'll get no argument from me about the Biden government being fascist adjacent, no. The font was chosen by that government for accessibility reasons. The font has now been changed for purely aesthetic reasons, attaching the politics of anti-DEIA to a particular aesthetic (serifed fonts).

As for the politics of that government, a history lesson; In 1930s Germany, Liberals did nothing to abort the rise of NSDAP, seeing them as economic allies if not political allies. They sold out their country and turned a blind eye to genuine evil for profit and the reduction of the political influence of their workforce.

Nope. That choice wasn't for aesthetic reasons.

They still do. It's the required font for all US Supreme Court legal work.

Oh, I could have picked a other font. I just get a smug feeling when forcing these websites to use Arial. The main reason for using another font on these web pages is that their own choices are worse than not changing it. So that list of thousands of web pages is to make their web pages legible and more usable, not just to be a prick.

I picked Arial so that I could tell the web pages apart from those who had the good taste to leave my web browsers standard font alone. I don't mind arial.

With all the fanfare made over Calibri back when it was announced, TIL about Aptos

> their demographics are shaky AF

Every major country's demographics are shaky. Japan and S.Korea are already shrinking. The US is propped up by, uh, low-quality immigration, and fertility has nevertheless dropped to record lows. The large countries of Europe are either basket-cases, tinderboxes, or both. Germany and Italy haven't had above-replacement TFR since 1970!

China's not doing great, but having a population reservoir of 1.4B can make up for a lot of deficiencies. If everybody shrinks or becomes utterly dysfunctional, I'd bet that a vast, productive, essentially monoethnic nation weathers the storm better than the rest.

The wiki explicitly mension the typical sans disadvantage: "One potential source of confusion in Calibri is a visible homoglyph, a pair of easily confused characters: the lowercase letter L and the uppercase letter i (l and I) of the Latin script are effectively indistinguishable."

So while I prefer Calibri as TNR has been the default for longer and hence is more boring to me, I can understand people might prefer a serif font for readability.

Note that, even if that's all true (and I do agree that studies should have been conducted), the two positions are:

a) We made this change because we think it will help certain people

and

b) We made this change because we fundamentally disagree with attempts to help certain people, whether effective or not

I think b) is a lot worse than a). Or, to put it another way, has the current administration demonstrated a benefit from this change, or are they behaving at least as badly as "the left"?

"Decisions I know nothing about are signaling" is a phenomenally uncurious approach to life.

I easily found some research by searching Google scholar:

https://www.scitepress.org/Papers/2021/109668/109668.pdf

It's not a big difference, but apparently TNR was the worst of the fonts tested for OCR.

But anyway, there was no "signaling" about the change to Calibri. No-one ever tried to make a political issue out of it the way Rubio is now.

> Let's say, in an alternate universe where Rubio's department genuinely thought there were cost or coordination issues with Calibri. They could have reversed the decision and cited that.

So apparently Daring Fireball (of all places) got their hands on the full memo text[1]. And in all of the text, there are 2 sentences total that refer to DEI at all, the rest of it is talking about those coordination and cost issues. So I guess they did do that, they just also had to take their shots at DEI because why be in politics these days if you can't virtue signal even the most standard of decisions.

[1]: https://daringfireball.net/misc/2025/12/state-department-ret...

"Woke" is not, in fact, their words. The source article doesn't quote Rubio as saying "woke". The NY Times coverage (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/us/politics/rubio-state-d...) goes into a lot more detail than Reuters, as is typical; they don't publish the full text of the order (IIUC this is common to protect sources), but they say Rubio cited a number of coordination and messaging issues, along with a metric of document accessibility requests which he says did not decrease in the Calibri era.

Again, I say this not to nitpick or to dispute that it's kinda silly, but to emphasize that this is a provocation you shouldn't and don't need to rise to. The State Department's font choices do not matter, and it will not hurt anyone nor create a bad permission structure if they use Times New Roman. The only possible way this story could become even a tiny bit consequential is if Democrats take the bait and radicalize against serifs.

Got to hand it to them - Fraktur is an annoying font. It looks cool, though.

As if anybody would be daft enough to deny that you are of course absolutely right, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/us/politics/rubio-state-d... has this additional detail:

> Mr. Rubio's directive, under the subject line "Return to Tradition: Times New Roman 14-Point Font Required for All Department Paper,"

The same John Gruber that, quote tweeting a news article about Israel closing off phone and internet services to Gazans, wrote "Fuck around and find out"

> And I do not buy the argument that Calibri is somehow more accessible for those with low vision or reading disabilities

Oh well that settles it, John Gruber doesn’t buy the argument. Wrap it up and let’s head home, folks, this one’s settled, no need to refer to any actual research or evidence.

> they need more than a sans serif typeface,

Agreed.

So... why are the administration going in the opposite direction?

> Official departmental paperwork shouldn't look clownish.

Oh. It's about looking clownish. Right. OK. Pull up a chair, this might take a while, and we will get to typefaces pretty late on, I'll be honest

I hadn't planned on spending my evening googling the pay grade of government officials, calculating the time taken to change a font on Microsoft Word and extrapolating that over a year.

But I'm game if you are?

Jupyter notebooks or excel?

If you had read the article, you would know the answer to this question.

Calibri is a font designed to be easier to read on screens, which is where documents are primarily read in 2025. Switching to using Calibri as the default was a meaningful change that provided improved accessibility at literally no cost to anyone.

Switching back to Times New Roman, a serif font that is provably more difficult to read on screens is yet another act of performative cruelty by this administration who seemingly operates with "the cruelty is the point" as one of its core tenets.

Performative? The one that you read about. The one that had a press release, the one that had articles on social media that you are commenting on.

Meaningful? The one that looked into which font was more readable, for the most people

This is a performative change.

The change to Calibri was meaningful.

Because Calibri is an easier to read font on screens, which is where a lot more reading is being done.

Since it was done as an accessibility measure, it is seen as something for "inclusion" which is part of the scary "DEI" (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion). So it had to go, because forbid we do something that makes things slightly easier for people.

Let's even say (incorrectly, probably) that the switch to Calibri was "performative" or "virtue signaling". That's, in my opinion, significantly less terrible than performative cruelty or anti-virtue signaling.

Thank you - exactly what I meant. I thought it was a common understanding when used in this context.

So it’s a partisan word then and basically devoid of meaning and consistency across political lines. When hasn’t the us political class been a joke by such a definition…? Perhaps when we owned slaves, or interned the Japanese?

you and I have very different definitions of joke it seems.

I forgot Dr. Oz, who is in charge of Health and Human Services.

Lots of articles about this; here's a random one: https://deadline.com/gallery/fox-news-personalities-trump-wh...

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Is there any evidence that sans-serif typefaces are more readable? I’ve previously seen headlines claiming the opposite.

You understand both justifications are actually made up? As there is no evidence Calibri has better readability, certainly it doesn't have anything to do with wokeism.