A brief history of Times New Roman

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?

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.

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/

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.

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.

I'm fond of STIX Two, which is very close to Times New Roman but just a little bit nicer, especially the italic.

The irony is that Butterick’s “Equity” is beautiful.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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 cool where can i find these fonts?

Is this related to Trump's ban on Calibri?