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.
How is using the default font wasteful? Apart from anything else I’m pretty sure it uses less ink.
You’re looking for reason? In this administration?
You should be looking for motive instead. Handicaps are now a kind of diversity. ICE will get right on it.
look i know literally everyone says this and it’s overdone by this point, but it’s true: we are in the onion timeline
Shout out to all the people who don’t know what font they are using!
We use fonts? 🙈
I think they should have been changed straight out to comic sans.
Or Papyrus!
Imagine being so insecure that you’re threatened by a font…
I’m threatened by wingdings… what are they really saying? (͡•_ ͡• )
Q33
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Now that we’re on this topic, Aptos sucks
But I think it’s still better than Calibri.
This reminds me of Reagan removing solar panels from the white house just to spite the libs. We spent good money installing those, and they only served to save money down the road. It probably took even more money to uninstall them with 0 benefits in doing so. Just leave it, literally is hurting nothing at all.
It really feels like all of this is just fire and movement to confuse those that are not paying attention, or unable to. Make it easier for the proles to land on the decision to bury their heads in the sand.
This administration is a master class in insecurity projection.
Culture wars are all Republicans have. Their prime objective is to get people arguing over things that don’t matter.
which why thier primary policy of concern, just before the election is “wokeness”
Ugh even the fonts they like are old and boring. Anyways, this is a Comic Sans administration if I ever saw one.
Hey, there are many fantastic old fonts. Most of the greats date back to the nineteenth century.
Times New Roman isn’t one of them, of course, but still.
As for Comic Sans, if I recall correctly it was intended to make reading easier for dyslexic readers, so I can’t see these bastards using it. Times New Roman is more their thing… though I could maybe see them using Papyrus.
Wasn’t the best choice of words I guess, overused, plain, stuffy, vanilla. Comic sans is also popular with dumbass tech-illiterate management types and that is these folks in spades. Of course most of the best fonts are old.
The white house is full of WingDings.
Zapf Dingbats if you ask me but you’re definitely onto something here. 😅
Comic Sans is good for dyslexics, so this is definitely not the right font for this administration, despite its name.
What if it’s written in ketchup?
The experts and my own eyeballs agree that Calibri is slightly easier to read than Times New Roman, and it’s an improvement in legibility that means a lot to people with poor eyesight. But Republicans don’t give a shit about people with vision issues, probably think they should pull their eyes up by their bootstraps, so Times New Roman it is.
What in the goddamn actual fuck?
Literally anything to avoid doing actual work.
Republicans are like the one asshole in the group project that shows up with some stale donuts once and thinks they’ve fulfilled their end of the group project responsibilities.
So true lol. They are the type of teammate who only shows up 20% of the time, works on one tiny piece of the project with lots of help from other members, then claims they did all the work or blames everyone else when the project doesn’t get finished on time.
Welcome to the culture war I guess, Calibri. God, this timeline is dumb.
Fascist timelines always are.
Performative cruelty. So hot right now.
Why can’t they just use Helvetica like any normal bureaucratic institution?
Because the Swiss are foreign
Actually, it’s a little surprising now that I think of it that the US government never designed its own official font. That’s exactly the sort of weird shit any administration might try
Yeah, even Italy designed their official font. It’s called Titillium.
Instinctively I feel like doing that is a bad idea, since it makes it easier for scammers to create documents that have the feel of authority when trying to con people.
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 AptosMy 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
