Memo from Marco Rubio reportedly said cutting Calibri from official communication would ‘abolish yet another wasteful DEIA program
US diplomats have been ordered to return to using the Times New Roman typeface in official communications, with secretary of state Marco Rubio calling the Biden administration’s decision to adopt Calibri a “wasteful” diversity move, according to an internal department cable seen by Reuters.
The department under Rubio’s predecessor Antony Blinken switched to Calibri in 2023, claiming the modern sans-serif typeface was more accessible for people with disabilities because it did not have the decorative angular features and was the default in Microsoft products.
Funny how they switched to Calibri in 2023, after it’s been the default since office 2007.
Even funnier how one year after the change, microsoft changed default again away from Calibri to Aptos
My take on Aptos is that they designed it to make alternative office suites less compatible. Until now, when you installed Microsoft Office, its fonts were available system wide, so by installing Office 2007 or greater, it would make Calibri available for any other office suite on the system.
But now Aptos is an exclusive of Office 365. Without hacks, the font can only be used in the latest versions of Microsoft Word, and LibreOffice on the same system can’t load it, forced to replace it.
People will think “what the hell, when I open word files with LibreOffice, It changes the font, LibreOffice is not good”
.DOCX format wars are back, baby!
Ugh. That was a horrendous time to be in university.
Can aptos be acquired through other means for LibreOffice?
Yes, it’s hidden somewhere in the disk and it’s a normal font file, otherwise
It’s in AppData\Local\Microsoft\FontCache\4\CloudFonts\
It’s not only Aptos, office 365 expands the font selection with ~100 exclusive “cloud” fonts that are hidden to other non-microsoft apps