Aurich Lawson | Getty Images
Official correspondence from US diplomats is getting a revamp next month. Starting Feb. 6, the U.S. State Department will use Microsoft’s Sans Serif Calibri in 14-point format “for all paper submitted to the Executive Secretariat,” according to Washington Post diplomatic reporter John Hudson.
big news for font freaks: Times New Roman is being phased out at the State Department and replaced by Calibri. Secretary Blinken sent a telegram to all embassies today to instruct staff to stop sending him Times New Roman papers. Subject: “The Times (New Roman) is changing” pic.twitter.com/HENLbRH3UQ
— John Hudson (@John_Hudson) January 17, 2023
The move led to a somewhat tendentious discussion in Ars’ virtual office earlier today. In the cable, the State Department refers to Times New Roman and Calibri as fonts. But technically it should have referred to Times New Roman and Calibri as fonts. Rather, a font is how you manipulate that font, such as making it size or weight, spacing, or italicizing.
“If we’re being pedantic (AND I AM!), a font is a clade of a font, I guess? semantically meaningful sentence,” said a rather pedantic colleague.
But as a less pedantic colleague pointed out, “This is one of those goggles that push things up that people who work with them regularly ignore.”
A third blamed early word processors, “listing different fonts as ‘fonts’ and fonts as ‘font styles’.”
Other parts of the federal government have previously expressed preferences regarding fonts. For example, if you are applying for a grant to the National Institutes of Health, there are some rules and guidelines for formatting that application.
Nothing smaller than 11-point text, no more than 15 characters per linear inch, and no more than six lines per vertical inch is allowed to prevent talkative researchers from trying to fit a thesis into an R01. For fonts, Arial, Georgia, Helvetica, and Palatino Linotype are recommended but not required — our nation’s leading biomedical research funding agency is apparently ambivalent about serifs versus sans serifs.
Aesthetics was not the main reason for this change. In The Washington Post, Hudson writes that “[t]The secretary’s decision was motivated by accessibility concerns, not aesthetics, said a senior State Department official familiar with the change. Sans-serif fonts are easier to read than their more baroque relatives, especially on a screen. In addition, sans-serif fonts are less likely to create problems for people who need to use optical character recognition and text-to-speech tools.
Calibri is a relatively new font, created around the turn of the century by Dutch type designer Lucas de Groot. In 2007, it replaced Times New Roman as the default font for Microsoft Word, acknowledging that in the future most documents would be read on screens rather than paper.
In January, Secretary Antony Blinken instructed his staff to find a more accessible font, and as the default sans-serif font in Microsoft Office, Calibri was clearly appealing. Calibri may not be the default Microsoft Word font forever. In 2021, we learned that the company was already looking for replacements.
