A change of typeface: Microsoft’s new default font has arrived

Re:A change of typeface: Microsoft’s new default font has ar... by pavlov on Friday July 14, 2023 @03:46AM (#36720652)

Changing the default fonts in Office acts as a generational marker for documents.

A lot of non-professionally designed content gets produced with these defaults: Excel sheets and memoirs and school essays and wills and corporate PowerPoints and the haphazard printed sign on the coffee shop’s door that announces a job vacancy.

All of that was in Calibri, but soon it will be in Aptos. And in a couple of years Calibri will start looking oddly nostalgic to people born around 2000.

These Office font generations are also useful for detecting forgeries. There was a court case involving an inheritance where documents supposedly printed in 2005 were set in Calibri, which wasn’t available yet.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A change of typeface: Microsoft’s new default font has ar... by bobthepanda on Friday July 14, 2023 @03:59AM (#36720726)

Corruption involving a Pakistani prime minister was also subject to similar forgeries: https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/12/15961354/pakistan-calibri...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A change of typeface: Microsoft’s new default font has ar... by FormerBandmate on Friday July 14, 2023 @03:17PM (#36728646)

Calibri literally toppled the government of a nuclear power

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A change of typeface: Microsoft’s new default font has ar... by Freedom2 on Friday July 14, 2023 @04:01AM (#36720744)

Here's an article going into detail regarding the forgeries: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/07/not-for-the-firs...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A change of typeface: Microsoft’s new default font has ar... by TRiG_Ireland on Friday July 14, 2023 @05:00AM (#36721261)

Memes too, as analysed by Linus Boman.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJYm-de_UHE

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A change of typeface: Microsoft’s new default font has ar... by jxramos on Friday July 14, 2023 @11:19AM (#36725234)

that was an interesting diversion, didn't expect to hear a reference about a fifth generational warfare bit either. Very surprising.

8:36 on the other hand, Reddit has been known to be a target of organized foreign trolling campaigns by organizations like Russia's Internet Research Agency. A common tactic amongst these troll accounts is to post to popular subreddits in order to build Reddit Karma. Choosing to use one obscure Cyrillic alphabet font does not prove things one way or the other but there is a good reason to consider using this font type a graphically suspect. https://youtu.be/cJYm-de_UHE?t=516

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A change of typeface: Microsoft’s new default font has ar... by dave78 on Friday July 14, 2023 @12:03PM (#36725897)

And of course there was the time when Dan Rather got busted using forged documents in "Memogate" due to something very similar - fonts from Word pretending to be a document from the 70s. The Wikipedia article has a nice animated GIF comparing the forged document to Word's default settings in 2004.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A change of typeface: Microsoft’s new default font has ar... by twobitshifter on Friday July 14, 2023 @01:10PM (#36726802)

One datacollada discovery (Dan Ariely sign at top/bottom) hinges on original cells in Calibri and forged cells in Cambria.

https://datacolada.org/98

[ Parent | on HN ]