> And only the most pretentious of font snobs (…) could tell the difference between a Helvetica and an Arial specimen. Everybody with a passing interest in typ

> And only the most pretentious of font snobs (…) could tell the difference between a Helvetica and an Arial specimen. Everybody with a passing interest in typefaces can tell Helvetica and Arial apart—that’s hardly a hallmark of pretentiousness. Judging Arial as a Helvetica clone might be pretentious, especially given how Helvetica is itself a clone (of Akzidenzk Grotesk). > TNR is an absolutely brilliant font for its intended use case (i.e. dense body text). Being optimised for denseness makes it a bad default choice for Word though… Especially for the page wide one column layouts that 99% of Word documents are. I think it works much better in the narrow newspaper columns for which it was designed, and where space is at a premium. Times and Times New Roman get used often in scientific publishing, I imagine because the fonts default-looking-ness makes things look undesigned and unfrivolous. Also here it looks off in the single column designs most books use. I have a hard copy of SICP, which is typeset in LaTeX, and it really bums me that it’s set in Times. Especially since LaTeX’s default font Computer Modern works better for readability IMHO. > Virtually every mainstream font out there is a riff on some design that's been around for a century or more. For sure! https://i.liketightpants.net/and/no-one-starts-from-scratch-type-design-and-the-logic-of-the-fork https://i.liketightpants.net/and/no-one-starts-from-scratch-...