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.

  • skisnow@lemmy.ca
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    24 hours ago

    How is using the default font wasteful? Apart from anything else I’m pretty sure it uses less ink.

  • Doug Holland@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    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.

  • etherphon@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Ugh even the fonts they like are old and boring. Anyways, this is a Comic Sans administration if I ever saw one.

    • leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 day ago

      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.

      • etherphon@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        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.

    • moody@lemmings.world
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      2 days ago

      Comic Sans is good for dyslexics, so this is definitely not the right font for this administration, despite its name.

  • DarkFuture@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    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.

    • Guitarfun@lemmy.world
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      24 hours ago

      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.

    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      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

  • FiskFisk33@startrek.website
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    2 days ago

    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

    • Wispy2891@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      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”