This is written by Matthew Butterick—a lawyer, typographer, and programmer. He's got another online book called Practical Typography that will help you appreciate (and make!) good typography: https://practicaltypography.com/
The site is really fun: at the bottom you can change the body text from Valkyrie to Equity, Concourse, etc. (these are all fonts that he made).
His books are made with a Racket-based publishing system called Pollen. I've used it a little bit and it's nice: it's incredibly flexible, so you have to do a lot of work to get what you want out of it, but it also doesn't confine you.
He's made some gorgeous typefaces: https://mbtype.com/ His license is far and away the most permissive non-OFL license I've encountered: buy the font once for the lowest price I've seen in a professional font, and then you can use it pretty much everywhere indefinitely. So nice.
I use two of his typefaces (Valkyrie, similar to Palatino, and Hermes Maia, a sans-serif based off of a German typeface) on my blog so you can see it in action: https://lambdaland.org/
As someone who is not a design snob (I tend to fall into the ontology snob bucket) the bit I liked is the way the types were categorized, there is the roman style and the egyptian style. And while roman was obvious "Ah yes like times new roman" egyptian was not familiar to me. Easy enough to figure out that it is what today we call sans-serif but I wonder when the term fell out of use?
Oh cool, I hadn't heard that term until you mentioned it. Apparently the name was in flux in the early days. The Wikipedia page for Sans Serif has an interesting footnote:
> master sign-painter James Callingham writes in his textbook "Sign Writing and Glass Embossing" (1871) that "What one calls San-serif, another describes as grotesque; what is generally known as Egyptian, is some times called Antique, though it is difficult to say why, seeing that the letters so designated do not date farther back than the close of the last century. Egyptian is perhaps as good a term as could be given to the letters bearing that name, the blocks being characteristic of the Egyptian style of architecture. These letters were first used by sign-writers at the close of the last century, and were not introduced in printing till about twenty years later. Sign-writers were content to call them "block letters," and they are sometimes so-called at the present day; but on their being taken in hand by the type founders, they were appropriately named Egyptian. The credit of having introduced the ordinary square or san-serif letters also belongs to the sign-writer, by whom they were employed half a century before the type founder gave them his attention, which was about the year 1810."
It starts with the origins of TNR. Then it basically says it's a decent font with no significant problems. Then it talks about how it's popular because it's the default.
Then in the last paragraph it takes a hard stance that you should not use TNR unless required. It even implores the reader with a bold "please stop". It makes no arguments to support this stance and offers no alternatives.
That's because it's not an article, it's a section of Butterick's book. (He also has a book at https://practicaltypography.com/ that isn't targeted at lawyers, and I think a lot of the content overlaps.)
I agree that he's a bit too mean to mainstream fonts, though.
The problem with some of the less mainstream fonts is that they are not always readily available/transferrable. I don't tend to have issues with TNR going funny in another format. As for Helvetica, I don't think Microsoft supports it and created Arial which is an inferior version of it.
> Objectively, there’s nothing wrong with Times New Roman. It was designed for a newspaper, so it’s a bit narrower than most text fonts—especially the bold style. (Newspapers prefer narrow fonts because they fit more text per line.) The italic is mediocre. But those aren’t fatal flaws. Times New Roman is a workhorse font that’s been successful for a reason.
It says that there are problems. They're just not fatal.
> It even implores the reader with a bold "please stop". It makes no arguments to support this stance and offers no alternatives.
It says that there are plenty of alternatives (it specifically mentions Helvetica) that are better than Times New Roman. The argument is that Times New Roman is okay, but that it has flaws, and that there are easily available fonts that are superior. If someone is devoted enough to fonts to write a blog about them, then the existence of superior alternatives is enough of a reason to not use a font.
The author provides a single critisism ("The italic is mediocre"), does not elaborate, then immediately hedges their critique.
Helvetica is used as an example of a font which garners more "affection" in contrast to TNR, but is never praised by the author or recommended as an alternative - at least not in the linked passage.
The author also criticizes the narrowness of the font (and particularly of the bold style). They're not trying to argue that Times New Roman is terrible - just that it's substandard.
As a body copy font, sans serif is generally seen as "friendlier" and more casual--which is one reason you see more of it than you used to in marketing copy and many other uses. Friendly and casual are generally not things I'm looking for in legal documents.
This is not a standalone article but a section from Butterick's book, "Typography for Lawyers", which is hosted in full on the website. The book is an opinionated style manual, and many alternatives are described in nearby sections.
Times New Roman was ruined for me after years of it being what InDesign defaults to when a font is missing (along with a big ugly pink highlight). Years of associating the font with something being "broken" has pretty much left me never wanting to see it again.
My personal bias aside, in terms of a typeface itself, it's ok, but it feels like there have always been a number of alternatives that are stylistically better or more readable.
But as with anything in type, it just depends on what personality/style you're wanting to convey with it.
I may be wrong, but I believe the name of the type family is simply Times New; the name of the italic face would then be Times New Italic rather than the contradictory Times New Roman Italic. It’s strange that the name of the roman face specifically is always used; I’d suppose it’s merely because that’s how the digital fonts were inadvertently named? Times New Roman has been the name in dropdown menus, and most laypeople are unfamiliar with roman as a term of art, so there’s no reason people wouldn’t use that name. But I wonder how the digital fonts came to be named Times New Roman rather than Times New.
Re: "I may be wrong, but I believe the name of the type family is simply Times New; the name of the italic face would then be Times New Italic rather than the contradictory Times New Roman Italic."
The name of the typeface really is Times New Roman. The roman variant is called Times New Roman Regular and the italic, Times New Roman Italic (which I agree is awkward).
The reason for this is trademarks: "Times" was a registered trademark of Linotype and so when Monotype developed a similar typeface, they used and trademarked "Times New Roman."
Some time ago, I forget when, Monotype acquired Linotype and so is now the holder of both trademarks.
Don't know if Butterick's article mentions this or not. I've read it but not recently.
Replying to my own comment because I'm wrong. I thought that Times came first and Times New Roman later, but according to this article from the New York Public Library, the typeface was designed only once (by Stanley Morison).
The metal punches were then created jointly by Linotype and Monotype, which each sold these under different names (and registered trademarks), Times by Linotype and Times New Roman by Monotype.
IIRC, the Abobe Postscript font was simply called "Times", so that is usually what Macs had installed. Microsoft Windows shipped with the Truetype font called "Times New Roman", which was similar but not identical to the printer font.
My preferred font for federal work. Sadly all Florida appellate documents must be set in 14-point Arial or Bookman Old Style — a choice in name only.
One would think that by now we'd have a way to draft and file litigation papers in plain text, perhaps with some light markup, and then the courts could automatically generate cover pages, case styles, and tables of contents and authorities; each judge could apply his own preferred styling for working with it (like a LaTeX class file); and the courts could make the official document available to the public in html and pdf versions in whatever typesetting they deem appropriate. (Even better if the public could choose the format — CSS, perhaps.)
Instead we have ever-shifting rules and standards for compliance, which vary by jurisdiction, and which waste inestimable time, energy, and expense for rules committees, lawyers, administrative staff, printers, and, of course, clients.
Judges, particularly appellate judges, spend a lot of their time reading briefs. So, as you can see, some of them have strong opinions about brief typography. (Judges, as a group, have strong opinions about lots of things).
"The briefs, opinions of the district courts, essential parts of the appendices, and other required reading add up to about 1,000 pages per argument session. Reading that much is a chore; remembering it is even harder."
That is a lot of reading. Depending on how long an 'argument session' is, retaining the detail must be a challenge.
Indeed. I think what I'm imagining is something like Typst for courts and lawyers.
Imagine if, nationwide, we lawyers could draft in plain text and never (or rarely) have to worry about court-specific typesetting rules or wrestling with Word!
> each judge could apply his own preferred styling for working with it
imagine going to court and the judge has mandated that all documents be prepared using 18pt Jokerman[0], or that all headings must use Bleeding Cowboys[1].
I understand what you and creata are saying, and I don't necessarily disagree. What I mean is that everyone (judges and lawyers alike) could easily work off their own copy and refer to, say, paragraph numbers when necessary.
For instance, I would like 12-pt with ~1.2 line spacing, something akin to Tufte — so I have a nice wide margin to make notes and summaries.
I sure do like the way the Supreme Court sets its type [0]. I’d always imagined it must be laid out in the way you describe, with a LaTeX transform or something—it sounds like it’s really a manual kind of affair?
Of course the first comment I find upon searching is another of Matthew Butterick’s [1], in which he agrees that it’s Real Nice, and points out that the Supreme Court does not allow documents using Times New Roman to be filed there at all!
I don’t even mind that he’s writing this in his capacity as a fontmonger: if all SEO-type writing were at this level of quality and obsession, I’d be much less grumpy about it.
The plain text idea is brilliant and something I've been thinking about for a while. If they could do this, it would reduce storage and transmission costs of the courts various case management systems. I would increase the speed of the CMS systems. It would enable searchability and allow all readers and writers to render documents according to their preferences. Instead of scanned PDFs, they could have web forms with validation to make sure submissions are correct. This could be the future, if someone in law has some tech know how and vision.
After filing multiple motions and appeals in my divorce case, I fell in love with Bookman Old Style font. All my docs written now that require my signature, are all done in it. I agree with others saying to ditch Times New Roman, give a try to Bookman Old Style.
How many different courts does the typical attorney interact with? While it would be ideal if all courts used the same standards, that courts in very different jurisdictions have different format preferences doesn't seem like a big deal. If you're a real estate attorney in central Florida, are the requirements of the counties you operate in different and then the state courts different too? That seems like it would be somewhat of a hassle.
He's one of the best font developers working right now, he has a couple that I consider pretty much flawless examples within their categories.
Which is pretty funny because he's one of the typographers that is best known for his actual typography, ie information about arranging text on a plane, vs twiddling with letter design which is what most people think of with typography.
This, like almost all writing about fonts, is bewildering to me. It just doesn't matter. For me, there are just 3 fonts in the world: serif, sans serif, and weird fonts (Papyrus, the 70s groovy font, the Tron font, etc.)
I read HN articles about some company being shaken down for using an unlicensed font on their website, draconic font licensing agreements, paying per page impression for fonts. And I do not understand why anyone would even bother specifying a non-standard font that requires a license and payment for their website. None of your customers are going to care one bit either way. Except perhaps for the 0.000001% of the population that care about fonts. But even those, are they going to say "I'm not going to order my RAM from you, because you have a bad font on your site?" That seems unlikely. If using some non-free font costs even $1, or takes even 1 minute of your time, it's already a losing proposition.
What's even more strange is reading strong opinions on how great Helvetica is, or how terrible Arial is ("Microsoft bad", I know.) They're the same thing! I guess I'm too dumb to notice the subtle notes of citrus and leather in the kerning, the sublime genius of the hinting.
It just doesn’t matter… to you. Which is fine. Not everything matters to everyone equally. Typefaces are fundamentally art and they get the same level of appreciation that artwork receives, everything from none to abject worship. Don’t assume that your brain is at all like mine or anyone else’s.
I'd wish a lot of people who make statements like "it just doesn't matter,"
or "this is meaningless" or "this is stupid," or any statement that terminates without some kind of qualify or scope, perhaps take a moment and also add "to me" to it and consider if there might be people for whom that statement is not true.
I can't be bothered addressing the rest because it's like trying to explain emotions to a robot, but if you have a poorly hinted font, you will notice, because it'll be annoyingly blurry unless you have a high DPI display.
There are people out there bewildered by those of us who have strong operating system preferences. For most users, Windows, MacOS, Linux/Android, and iOS are pretty much the same thing. They let you connect to WiFi, install apps, send email, etc…. They show you icons you can click or double-click to launch an app.
I do think designers can go over the top. I could tell you stories. On the other hand, there is some line between design doesn't matter and "can't you see the difference between the two shades of black in this poster?" (Which is one of those stories.)
I should say as well that I've spent a fair bit of time in Asia and, to my Western eyes, a lot of conference materials look amateurish and make my eyes bleed. Maybe it doesn't matter much at the end of the day but I think it does at some level.
I don't disagree. There are a lot of subtle things that people notice and react to even if not consciously--and even if tech folks don't want to admit to.
You will enjoy riding the subway in NYC then. Your anxiety levels will remain blissfully low as you pass sign after sign randomly alternating between traditional and Neue and Helvetica, evidenced by perfectly and non-perfectly horizontal caps, for example on lowercase ‘e’ and ‘a’.
Kerning does affect readability sometimes. Some fonts cause more issues with dyslexia than others.
I wouldn't say it is so much that the population doesn't care about fonts, more a case of them interacting with them in ways they don't notice consciously. The fonts on packaging affect the public perception of a product (and whether they buy them). Other fonts can hint at something being more modern or more traditional.
I'm too dumb as well. I flipped this to make it about text editors. Personally, I love my Emacs:
This, like almost all writing about fonts, is bewildering to me. It just doesn't matter. For me, there are just 3 text editors in the world: IDE's, terminal editors, and weird editors (Ed, Teco, etc.)
What's even more strange is reading strong opinions on how great Emacs is, or how terrible NeoVim is ("Gnu good Apache bad", I know.) They're the same thing! I guess I'm too dumb to notice the subtle differences between Lisp and Lua.
I get where you're coming from, but the analogy sort of breaks down here - those of us who work with text editors all the time love our tool of choice because it has features that make our lives easier. I can't see how a font could have or lack a "feature".
It's not required for you to appreciate aesthetics. But I wager the reason you don't appreciate it is because you haven't experienced it. If you have only slept on a prison mat, you wouldn't understand people talking about a $4000 premium bed. If you only used Buzz Light-year target bedsheets, you wouldn't understand people comparing high thread count featherbeds. That's okay, you are still clinically healthy if you don't appreciate other dimensions some products offer.
Stuff like this makes me feel so neurotypical. Really. I can have a sprited argument about the benefits of the K&R brace style, for example. But often I see articles about "ugly" vs. "beautiful" fonts and the difference, to the untrained eye, is so minute as to be just technical.
Would you say that about really well-edited scene in a movie, or a photograph that feels perfect, or a joke with perfect delivery?
A lot of those things are defined by timing and the space between moments that aren't exactly fully rational. And, if they're doing it well, they make you feel something, even if you can't describe exactly how they're doing it.
A "beautiful" font is like that. The font itself is not beautiful on its own, imo; it's raw material. The beauty comes out in how it's used, when you can look at A or B completed thing and say, oh yeah, B feels "better," but I don't know exactly why. It's not just because of the font, but the font 100% matters.
I think it depends what field you are in. In printing and publishing, these font differences can create major issues, such as in formatting and readability. You are right, it is not an exact science and can be subjective, but it is important in some instances. Differences in fonts can affect the entire layout of a page. I was watching a video discussing some font and logo design within the Alien franchise, and some of it worked on a level which was very subtle but I believe effective.
Nonsense. Times New Roman was and is a beautiful accomplishment, and we are lucky that our society has widely standardized on such a beautiful font.
It captures the beauty of old style and transitional types like Garamond and Baskerville, without demanding the aristocratic luxury of space that these older fonts demanded, and without their stylistic pretensions. It's compact and has a high x-height. It's everyday; it doesn't connote literary snobbishness or state authority; it's the font of presses and shares its dignity with the everyday people who use it.
This excerpt's thesis seems to be that using a common font shows you don't care about your typography. This is true to some extent, but you can show you care while still making the excellent choice of Times by, e.g., using optical variants for titles, footnotes, and call numbers, and for God's sake turning on the fi ligature in Microsoft Word.
Mr. Butterick's fonts are also beautiful, but there's no need to shit on Times New Roman to sell them.
This is written by Matthew Butterick—a lawyer, typographer, and programmer. He's got another online book called Practical Typography that will help you appreciate (and make!) good typography: https://practicaltypography.com/
The site is really fun: at the bottom you can change the body text from Valkyrie to Equity, Concourse, etc. (these are all fonts that he made).
His books are made with a Racket-based publishing system called Pollen. I've used it a little bit and it's nice: it's incredibly flexible, so you have to do a lot of work to get what you want out of it, but it also doesn't confine you.
He's made some gorgeous typefaces: https://mbtype.com/ His license is far and away the most permissive non-OFL license I've encountered: buy the font once for the lowest price I've seen in a professional font, and then you can use it pretty much everywhere indefinitely. So nice.
I use two of his typefaces (Valkyrie, similar to Palatino, and Hermes Maia, a sans-serif based off of a German typeface) on my blog so you can see it in action: https://lambdaland.org/
While trying to find earlier information on type design I stumbled on this gorgeous 1878 guide for sign painters.
https://archive.org/details/gri_33125007673623
As someone who is not a design snob (I tend to fall into the ontology snob bucket) the bit I liked is the way the types were categorized, there is the roman style and the egyptian style. And while roman was obvious "Ah yes like times new roman" egyptian was not familiar to me. Easy enough to figure out that it is what today we call sans-serif but I wonder when the term fell out of use?
Oh cool, I hadn't heard that term until you mentioned it. Apparently the name was in flux in the early days. The Wikipedia page for Sans Serif has an interesting footnote:
> master sign-painter James Callingham writes in his textbook "Sign Writing and Glass Embossing" (1871) that "What one calls San-serif, another describes as grotesque; what is generally known as Egyptian, is some times called Antique, though it is difficult to say why, seeing that the letters so designated do not date farther back than the close of the last century. Egyptian is perhaps as good a term as could be given to the letters bearing that name, the blocks being characteristic of the Egyptian style of architecture. These letters were first used by sign-writers at the close of the last century, and were not introduced in printing till about twenty years later. Sign-writers were content to call them "block letters," and they are sometimes so-called at the present day; but on their being taken in hand by the type founders, they were appropriately named Egyptian. The credit of having introduced the ordinary square or san-serif letters also belongs to the sign-writer, by whom they were employed half a century before the type founder gave them his attention, which was about the year 1810."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sans-serif#cite_note-58
This article has a weird progression.
It starts with the origins of TNR. Then it basically says it's a decent font with no significant problems. Then it talks about how it's popular because it's the default.
Then in the last paragraph it takes a hard stance that you should not use TNR unless required. It even implores the reader with a bold "please stop". It makes no arguments to support this stance and offers no alternatives.
That's because it's not an article, it's a section of Butterick's book. (He also has a book at https://practicaltypography.com/ that isn't targeted at lawyers, and I think a lot of the content overlaps.)
I agree that he's a bit too mean to mainstream fonts, though.
The problem with some of the less mainstream fonts is that they are not always readily available/transferrable. I don't tend to have issues with TNR going funny in another format. As for Helvetica, I don't think Microsoft supports it and created Arial which is an inferior version of it.
Here's what is says about Times New Roman:
> Objectively, there’s nothing wrong with Times New Roman. It was designed for a newspaper, so it’s a bit narrower than most text fonts—especially the bold style. (Newspapers prefer narrow fonts because they fit more text per line.) The italic is mediocre. But those aren’t fatal flaws. Times New Roman is a workhorse font that’s been successful for a reason.
It says that there are problems. They're just not fatal.
> It even implores the reader with a bold "please stop". It makes no arguments to support this stance and offers no alternatives.
It says that there are plenty of alternatives (it specifically mentions Helvetica) that are better than Times New Roman. The argument is that Times New Roman is okay, but that it has flaws, and that there are easily available fonts that are superior. If someone is devoted enough to fonts to write a blog about them, then the existence of superior alternatives is enough of a reason to not use a font.
The author provides a single critisism ("The italic is mediocre"), does not elaborate, then immediately hedges their critique.
Helvetica is used as an example of a font which garners more "affection" in contrast to TNR, but is never praised by the author or recommended as an alternative - at least not in the linked passage.
The author also criticizes the narrowness of the font (and particularly of the bold style). They're not trying to argue that Times New Roman is terrible - just that it's substandard.
Helvetica is not usually in the running for use by lawyers.
As a body copy font, sans serif is generally seen as "friendlier" and more casual--which is one reason you see more of it than you used to in marketing copy and many other uses. Friendly and casual are generally not things I'm looking for in legal documents.
[flagged]
Did you wake up on the wrong side of the bed this morning?
This is not a standalone article but a section from Butterick's book, "Typography for Lawyers", which is hosted in full on the website. The book is an opinionated style manual, and many alternatives are described in nearby sections.
It does seem like it is trying to force a trend without giving one solid reason.
Times New Roman was ruined for me after years of it being what InDesign defaults to when a font is missing (along with a big ugly pink highlight). Years of associating the font with something being "broken" has pretty much left me never wanting to see it again.
My personal bias aside, in terms of a typeface itself, it's ok, but it feels like there have always been a number of alternatives that are stylistically better or more readable.
But as with anything in type, it just depends on what personality/style you're wanting to convey with it.
as we used to say a browser failed to load CSS or parts thereof: "and the whole thing goes Times New Roman ..."
this became a replacement for the phrase "it's all gone pear-shaped" to describe a dire situation.
I may be wrong, but I believe the name of the type family is simply Times New; the name of the italic face would then be Times New Italic rather than the contradictory Times New Roman Italic. It’s strange that the name of the roman face specifically is always used; I’d suppose it’s merely because that’s how the digital fonts were inadvertently named? Times New Roman has been the name in dropdown menus, and most laypeople are unfamiliar with roman as a term of art, so there’s no reason people wouldn’t use that name. But I wonder how the digital fonts came to be named Times New Roman rather than Times New.
Re: "I may be wrong, but I believe the name of the type family is simply Times New; the name of the italic face would then be Times New Italic rather than the contradictory Times New Roman Italic."
The name of the typeface really is Times New Roman. The roman variant is called Times New Roman Regular and the italic, Times New Roman Italic (which I agree is awkward).
The reason for this is trademarks: "Times" was a registered trademark of Linotype and so when Monotype developed a similar typeface, they used and trademarked "Times New Roman."
Some time ago, I forget when, Monotype acquired Linotype and so is now the holder of both trademarks.
Don't know if Butterick's article mentions this or not. I've read it but not recently.
Replying to my own comment because I'm wrong. I thought that Times came first and Times New Roman later, but according to this article from the New York Public Library, the typeface was designed only once (by Stanley Morison).
The metal punches were then created jointly by Linotype and Monotype, which each sold these under different names (and registered trademarks), Times by Linotype and Times New Roman by Monotype.
Forgot the link in the previous comment:
https://www.nypl.org/blog/2014/12/09/times-new-roman
IIRC, the Abobe Postscript font was simply called "Times", so that is usually what Macs had installed. Microsoft Windows shipped with the Truetype font called "Times New Roman", which was similar but not identical to the printer font.
The irony is that Butterick’s “Equity” is beautiful.
My preferred font for federal work. Sadly all Florida appellate documents must be set in 14-point Arial or Bookman Old Style — a choice in name only.
One would think that by now we'd have a way to draft and file litigation papers in plain text, perhaps with some light markup, and then the courts could automatically generate cover pages, case styles, and tables of contents and authorities; each judge could apply his own preferred styling for working with it (like a LaTeX class file); and the courts could make the official document available to the public in html and pdf versions in whatever typesetting they deem appropriate. (Even better if the public could choose the format — CSS, perhaps.)
Instead we have ever-shifting rules and standards for compliance, which vary by jurisdiction, and which waste inestimable time, energy, and expense for rules committees, lawyers, administrative staff, printers, and, of course, clients.
Some courts publish word processing templates for briefs; for example, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit: https://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/court-forms-fees/brief-template...
The Eighth Circuit gets really into this, publishing a typography guide for lawyers: https://federalcourt.press/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Eighth...
Judges, particularly appellate judges, spend a lot of their time reading briefs. So, as you can see, some of them have strong opinions about brief typography. (Judges, as a group, have strong opinions about lots of things).
I just read the complete Eighth Circuit guide and found it to an excellent reference. Thank you for the link.
"The briefs, opinions of the district courts, essential parts of the appendices, and other required reading add up to about 1,000 pages per argument session. Reading that much is a chore; remembering it is even harder."
That is a lot of reading. Depending on how long an 'argument session' is, retaining the detail must be a challenge.
Indeed. I think what I'm imagining is something like Typst for courts and lawyers.
Imagine if, nationwide, we lawyers could draft in plain text and never (or rarely) have to worry about court-specific typesetting rules or wrestling with Word!
> each judge could apply his own preferred styling for working with it
imagine going to court and the judge has mandated that all documents be prepared using 18pt Jokerman[0], or that all headings must use Bleeding Cowboys[1].
I understand what you and creata are saying, and I don't necessarily disagree. What I mean is that everyone (judges and lawyers alike) could easily work off their own copy and refer to, say, paragraph numbers when necessary.
For instance, I would like 12-pt with ~1.2 line spacing, something akin to Tufte — so I have a nice wide margin to make notes and summaries.
oh, you misunderstand. this is something i want to see happen. font anarchy now!
I sure do like the way the Supreme Court sets its type [0]. I’d always imagined it must be laid out in the way you describe, with a LaTeX transform or something—it sounds like it’s really a manual kind of affair?
Of course the first comment I find upon searching is another of Matthew Butterick’s [1], in which he agrees that it’s Real Nice, and points out that the Supreme Court does not allow documents using Times New Roman to be filed there at all!
I don’t even mind that he’s writing this in his capacity as a fontmonger: if all SEO-type writing were at this level of quality and obsession, I’d be much less grumpy about it.
[0] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/21-869_87ad.pdf
[1] https://typographyforlawyers.com/court-opinions.html
The plain text idea is brilliant and something I've been thinking about for a while. If they could do this, it would reduce storage and transmission costs of the courts various case management systems. I would increase the speed of the CMS systems. It would enable searchability and allow all readers and writers to render documents according to their preferences. Instead of scanned PDFs, they could have web forms with validation to make sure submissions are correct. This could be the future, if someone in law has some tech know how and vision.
After filing multiple motions and appeals in my divorce case, I fell in love with Bookman Old Style font. All my docs written now that require my signature, are all done in it. I agree with others saying to ditch Times New Roman, give a try to Bookman Old Style.
How many different courts does the typical attorney interact with? While it would be ideal if all courts used the same standards, that courts in very different jurisdictions have different format preferences doesn't seem like a big deal. If you're a real estate attorney in central Florida, are the requirements of the counties you operate in different and then the state courts different too? That seems like it would be somewhat of a hassle.
> each judge could apply his own preferred styling for working with it
It kind of makes sense to ensure that everyone is seeing the same thing, though, which is something PDF is (relatively) good at.
He's one of the best font developers working right now, he has a couple that I consider pretty much flawless examples within their categories.
Which is pretty funny because he's one of the typographers that is best known for his actual typography, ie information about arranging text on a plane, vs twiddling with letter design which is what most people think of with typography.
I'm fond of STIX Two, which is very close to Times New Roman but just a little bit nicer, especially the italic.
I agree! More praise: it's well-hinted, has good support for Unicode and math, and comes packaged with macOS.
It should be mentioned that the x-height is much higher than the usual Times New Roman, which is usually a good thing imo, but different.
I like how it looks, and I like it better than other fonts. I suppose that means the type-nazis will call for me being burned at the stake.
This, like almost all writing about fonts, is bewildering to me. It just doesn't matter. For me, there are just 3 fonts in the world: serif, sans serif, and weird fonts (Papyrus, the 70s groovy font, the Tron font, etc.)
I read HN articles about some company being shaken down for using an unlicensed font on their website, draconic font licensing agreements, paying per page impression for fonts. And I do not understand why anyone would even bother specifying a non-standard font that requires a license and payment for their website. None of your customers are going to care one bit either way. Except perhaps for the 0.000001% of the population that care about fonts. But even those, are they going to say "I'm not going to order my RAM from you, because you have a bad font on your site?" That seems unlikely. If using some non-free font costs even $1, or takes even 1 minute of your time, it's already a losing proposition.
What's even more strange is reading strong opinions on how great Helvetica is, or how terrible Arial is ("Microsoft bad", I know.) They're the same thing! I guess I'm too dumb to notice the subtle notes of citrus and leather in the kerning, the sublime genius of the hinting.
It just doesn’t matter… to you. Which is fine. Not everything matters to everyone equally. Typefaces are fundamentally art and they get the same level of appreciation that artwork receives, everything from none to abject worship. Don’t assume that your brain is at all like mine or anyone else’s.
I'd wish a lot of people who make statements like "it just doesn't matter," or "this is meaningless" or "this is stupid," or any statement that terminates without some kind of qualify or scope, perhaps take a moment and also add "to me" to it and consider if there might be people for whom that statement is not true.
In fairness to the person at the top of this thread, they did add qualifiers like that.
I can't be bothered addressing the rest because it's like trying to explain emotions to a robot, but if you have a poorly hinted font, you will notice, because it'll be annoyingly blurry unless you have a high DPI display.
There are people out there bewildered by those of us who have strong operating system preferences. For most users, Windows, MacOS, Linux/Android, and iOS are pretty much the same thing. They let you connect to WiFi, install apps, send email, etc…. They show you icons you can click or double-click to launch an app.
I do think designers can go over the top. I could tell you stories. On the other hand, there is some line between design doesn't matter and "can't you see the difference between the two shades of black in this poster?" (Which is one of those stories.)
I should say as well that I've spent a fair bit of time in Asia and, to my Western eyes, a lot of conference materials look amateurish and make my eyes bleed. Maybe it doesn't matter much at the end of the day but I think it does at some level.
According to Don Norman, attractive things work better. I assume that would include printed matter and signage.
I don't disagree. There are a lot of subtle things that people notice and react to even if not consciously--and even if tech folks don't want to admit to.
You will enjoy riding the subway in NYC then. Your anxiety levels will remain blissfully low as you pass sign after sign randomly alternating between traditional and Neue and Helvetica, evidenced by perfectly and non-perfectly horizontal caps, for example on lowercase ‘e’ and ‘a’.
Kerning does affect readability sometimes. Some fonts cause more issues with dyslexia than others.
I wouldn't say it is so much that the population doesn't care about fonts, more a case of them interacting with them in ways they don't notice consciously. The fonts on packaging affect the public perception of a product (and whether they buy them). Other fonts can hint at something being more modern or more traditional.
I'm too dumb as well. I flipped this to make it about text editors. Personally, I love my Emacs:
This, like almost all writing about fonts, is bewildering to me. It just doesn't matter. For me, there are just 3 text editors in the world: IDE's, terminal editors, and weird editors (Ed, Teco, etc.)
What's even more strange is reading strong opinions on how great Emacs is, or how terrible NeoVim is ("Gnu good Apache bad", I know.) They're the same thing! I guess I'm too dumb to notice the subtle differences between Lisp and Lua.
> about text editors
I get where you're coming from, but the analogy sort of breaks down here - those of us who work with text editors all the time love our tool of choice because it has features that make our lives easier. I can't see how a font could have or lack a "feature".
> I can't see how a font could have or lack a "feature"
Oh boy. Everything about a typeface is a feature, and many of them are functional and not just stylistic choices.
- Monospace glyphs are a feature almost everyone here is familiar with and appreciates.
- Serifs are a feature for readability
- Open apertures like in humanist fonts are more readable
- Closed apertures in grotesque fonts make the text more dense
- Stroke contrast
- X-height
- Variety of weights
- Ligatures
- Dotted or slashed zero to distinguish it from capital O
- Features to distinguish capital I and lowercase l glyphs
...these are all features of a typeface.
Not to mention all the far-out OpenType features.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_typographic_features
It's not required for you to appreciate aesthetics. But I wager the reason you don't appreciate it is because you haven't experienced it. If you have only slept on a prison mat, you wouldn't understand people talking about a $4000 premium bed. If you only used Buzz Light-year target bedsheets, you wouldn't understand people comparing high thread count featherbeds. That's okay, you are still clinically healthy if you don't appreciate other dimensions some products offer.
If you think that all fonts are equally legible, then I can confidently say that you need glasses.
The most legible font is Atkinson Hyperlegible, which is free and developed by the Braille institute.
https://www.brailleinstitute.org/freefont/
I never see people using it because it's a weird hybrid between serif and sans serif, breaking many traditional design rules.
That’s the most legible font for people with impaired vision, which is a completely different concept
I'm replying to the comment saying "you need glasses" to say that the best font for people that need glasses is free.
They really aren't! I was looking at some small print earlier in low light conditions and the font does make all the difference there.
Falsehoods programmers believe about fonts
Stuff like this makes me feel so neurotypical. Really. I can have a sprited argument about the benefits of the K&R brace style, for example. But often I see articles about "ugly" vs. "beautiful" fonts and the difference, to the untrained eye, is so minute as to be just technical.
Would you say that about really well-edited scene in a movie, or a photograph that feels perfect, or a joke with perfect delivery?
A lot of those things are defined by timing and the space between moments that aren't exactly fully rational. And, if they're doing it well, they make you feel something, even if you can't describe exactly how they're doing it.
A "beautiful" font is like that. The font itself is not beautiful on its own, imo; it's raw material. The beauty comes out in how it's used, when you can look at A or B completed thing and say, oh yeah, B feels "better," but I don't know exactly why. It's not just because of the font, but the font 100% matters.
I think it depends what field you are in. In printing and publishing, these font differences can create major issues, such as in formatting and readability. You are right, it is not an exact science and can be subjective, but it is important in some instances. Differences in fonts can affect the entire layout of a page. I was watching a video discussing some font and logo design within the Alien franchise, and some of it worked on a level which was very subtle but I believe effective.
Nonsense. Times New Roman was and is a beautiful accomplishment, and we are lucky that our society has widely standardized on such a beautiful font.
It captures the beauty of old style and transitional types like Garamond and Baskerville, without demanding the aristocratic luxury of space that these older fonts demanded, and without their stylistic pretensions. It's compact and has a high x-height. It's everyday; it doesn't connote literary snobbishness or state authority; it's the font of presses and shares its dignity with the everyday people who use it.
This excerpt's thesis seems to be that using a common font shows you don't care about your typography. This is true to some extent, but you can show you care while still making the excellent choice of Times by, e.g., using optical variants for titles, footnotes, and call numbers, and for God's sake turning on the fi ligature in Microsoft Word.
Mr. Butterick's fonts are also beautiful, but there's no need to shit on Times New Roman to sell them.
I find Times New Roman very easy to read and available on many platforms.
"1929, the Times hired typographer Stanley Morison to create a new text font."
Shame the author doesn't know rhe difference between typeface and font.
this is cool where can i find these fonts?
Is this related to Trump's ban on Calibri?