Friday, May 20, 2005

I Think I’ll Write My Congressman :^)

I think I’m a pretty even-keeled person in general. There are not that many things that I get terribly passionate about – well, outside of the world of technology, that’s true anyway. This morning it happened though.

I opened a reference document from a company that my employer does tens of millions of dollars worth of business with every year. That document was hands down the ugliest professional literature I have ever seen. There was no attempt at formatting of any kind and the sections of the document all ran together into one nasty stream of literary trash. But to rub salt into the wound, the entire document was written in Times New Roman – undeniably the world’s ugliest font (courier comes in a close second).

It is really time to move beyond that ugly typeface! Why do word processing developers still make that the default font for all new documents? It gives rise to ugly documents from people who are too lazy to change the font to something that is actually pleasant to read. Since I don’t think I can convince Microsoft or Word Perfect to change the default, I’ve decided to write to my congressman and ask him to sponsor a bill to outlaw Times New Roman. What do you think, would you vote for it if it came up on the November ballot?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

So which font to you want us all to use?
I like TNR.

Josh Bancroft said...

I'm a strong backer of the Tahoma/Verdana party...

Brian said...

My personal favorite is probably plain old Arial, but I like Josh, I like both Tahoma and Verdana. My biggest gripe with TNR (I probably should have put this in the original post) is that I think it's actually more difficult to read than some of the cleaner fonts like Arial or Verdana. My dear wife loves the fancy fonts, but I would rather be able to read the document when it's all said and done. :^)
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