The Times New Roman commentary could have been true back when it was written, but now Calibri is the default for Microsoft Word, and has been for a long while (almost 20 years). So choosing Calibri is the path of least resistance.

Aptos has been the default font for Microsoft Word since 2023.

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

Aptos is slightly wider and taller but looks very very similar to calibri, especially calibri a point larger.

I enjoyed the argument that this is going to open up a new time point for digital forensics. Many people have doctored documents pretending to have made them in the past. Except they did not realize that the vintage software used font X, but the modern default is now Y. There have been a few court cases where essentially someone is able to say, “This font is clearly Calibri which did not exist at the time this document was supposedly printed.”

If you are a Deep Space 9 fan, this is where you get to scream, “It’s a fake!!!”

Example: https://valawyersweekly.com/2023/04/03/font-choice-exposes-f...

The more famous example being the Pakistani Prime Minister forging documents in Calibri dated before its release.

https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-40571708

So now Times New Roman not only looks uninspired and bland, but also dated? Yeah, I would say that's a good fit...

>Still, I would have gone with Comic Sans.

I don't often genuinely laugh out loud at comments on HN, but that one was good! Subtle, classy, and a gentle yet effective dig.

Honestly, I like Comic Sans.

It’s clear, legible and whimsical.

I definitely was thinking of Comic Sans. Both in terms of the horrible typeface and the “not funny” connotation of the name. (Yeah I know sans is referring to lack of serif)

People like this makes me want to use Times New Roman more. Maybe not Butterick specifically (the website is fine), but all those people that make a blog and pick a font before even knowing what they even want to write. Most of the time people change the default my web browser has, they make things worse. For a font choice to be any kind of personal expression in my eyes, you first need everything else in place: content, layout, design.

To spite these people I force the use of Arial on the worst offenders. The list is now a couple of thousand websites long.

But you're not spiting anyone, they don't even know about this, just wasting your time compiling a list of a thousand websites

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.

Perhaps your smug feeling can cancel out the smug feeling the author/publisher had when picking a font before even knowing what they even want to write.

It's important to keep the smugness balanced, thanks for doing your part.

You can’t separate layout and design from typeface selection.

But yes I agree content must come first. Typeface probably comes second!

When there's an HN link to some philosophy website that intentionally only uses lower-case letters, an obscure font, and yellow on green color scheme, with a page explaining those choices

> Most of the time people change the default my web browser has, they make things worse.

In Firefox: Settings → Fonts → Advanced… → untick Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above. I’ve been running this way for almost six years now; it makes the web so much better.

For about ten years I worked for composition shops, and eventually for a maker of typesetting systems. Through blurred eyes I could tell TNR from Baskerville from Garamond from Janson from ... Some of these fonts I can still identify.

But I have no idea what font was used in the book I just finished reading or the book that I'm returning to later today. My main question about a font is whether I can read it with old eyes.

I do agree that designers should care about these matters. I'll add that for some portion of the reading public TNR more likely means The New Republic than Times New Roman.

[Five minutes later: the book just finished, What We Can Know by Ian McEwan, appears to be set in Palatino, never a favorite of mine. The one I'm returning to, I'm not sure.]

My old eyes really wish more people used something like New Century Schoolbook.

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

> I would have gone with Comic Sans

Funny, I would have gone with Tannenberg

In the context of documents, the lack of font choice regarding Times New Roman could be partly attributed to the fact that it was the default font on Microsoft Word until 2007. The irony is, of course, that it was replaced by none other than Calibri.