If I remember correctly Microsoft did a bunch of studies back in the day and found the Calibri had some of the best readability across a range of visibility and reading impairments (like dyslexia).

Serif fonts have some readability features of their own, specifically for printed word.

You are correct. Microsoft invested significantly to create a modern properly designed font that is easy to read on a variety of screens, prints clearly and consistently, scales well, and can do italics, bold, etc well.

I think this came out back with Office 2007 or something. I believe Aptos is actually the new next generation font that should generally be considered an enhancement to Calibri.

While Microsoft isnt great at many things, their investment in font design and support is outstanding.

One of the reasons Calibri was selected over Times New Roman was it has a lower rate of OCR transcription errors, making documents using it easier for people using screen readers.

Link on that, as OCR should be more reliable with Times New Roman due to significant serifs.

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)

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

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

Just because they claimed it, doesn't make it true. OCR and screen reader software in 2023 did not have problems with serifs.

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]

That doesn't make much sense, since a typewriter will neither type Calibri nor Times New Roman. And OCR should only be needed for type written documents, because any document made with Calibri or TNR is already digital.

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

> Printed documents - Use the original, which is digital.

> Images - Use the original, which is digital.

> horribly inaccessible pdfs - Use the original, which has real text in the PDF

> horribly inaccessible websites - All text on any web site is digital. Nobody uses OCR on a website.

A massive paper producer like the government shouldn't adopt their type setting to people who are using technology wrongly.

an example from today (pdf warning): https://www.ntsb.gov/news/Documents/National%20Defense%20Aut...

God damn...

Why didn't they fax it back and forth a few times as well, just for good measure?

it's easier to mandate font than to excise all processes within the fed bureaucracy that result in these.

images being digital have no bearing on OCR ability

Images: use the original, which is a digital text document and not an image.

Unless they are making documents on typewriters. And in those cases neither Biden or Trump font is an option.

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

On a screen, vs. Times New Roman? Absolutely, and it isn't at all close. Serifs on even the highest DPI displays look pretty terrible when compared with print, and lose readability tests every time they're measured.

Interesting. The Wikipedia page for Times New Roman has a pretty fun blurb printed in the newspaper when they first implemented it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_New_Roman?st_source=ai_m...

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.

> the slightly higher density of the Times version (compare row by row)

I don't think that's the comparison you want to draw? The rows appear to hold very similar amounts of text.

But the rows on the left, in Times New Roman, are shorter than the rows on the right. So even though "one row" holds the same amount of text, one column-inch of Times New Roman holds more rows.

The Times New Roman looks more readable to me because it has thicker strokes. This isn't really an issue in a digital font; you can't accidentally apply a thin layer of black to a pixel and let the color underneath show through.

Anecdotal but the new default Office font Aptos seems much better than both TNR and Calibri.

This feels more like Microsoft lock-in than anything else. But I don't know how that conspiracy would actually work.

What is involved in changing the font for a government agency?