When I fire up my laptop to begin writing a newspaper column or anything else, the first thing to decide is what font to use. If I skip that step, Microsoft Word defaults to Aptos, and not just because it’s first alphabetically in my computer’s list of dozens of font possibilities. But more about that later.
Choosing a font is one of the most fun things about typing on a word processor, especially for a person—me, for instance—who learned to type back in the olden days when there were no choices at all. Some typewriters used “pica” type, with ten characters per inch. Some used twelve-character-per-inch “elite” type. Other than those distinctions, typing was typing. The font produced on those typewriters—although the term “font” wasn’t even used back then—was most like the modern-day “Courier.”
All of which is a very long—perhaps too long—lead-in to a news story that kind of slid under my radar during the busyness of the holiday season.
It would seem that on December 10, 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio ordered all U.S. diplomatic correspondence to revert to the use of the Times New Roman font, which was replaced in State Department documents with the Calibri font in 2023.
Times New Roman was created in London in 1931 by Stanley Morrison and Victor Lardent for “The Times” newspaper and released to great fanfare in 1932. The font was designed both for efficiency (how many words could be squeezed onto a page of newsprint) and for readability. Times New Roman gained traction among printers in the United States in the 1940s and 50s and became ubiquitous in the digital age when Microsoft included it as a core font in Windows. To this day, it is considered the standard font in legal and academic documents.
So why the change-over to Calibri in 2023 by then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken? Calibri is a “sans-serif” font, meaning it lacks the small lines at the end of alphabetical letters that characterize Times New Roman and other “serif” fonts. Many experts believe that sans-serif type is more readable on screens and therefore better suited for our current digital age. It’s rounder, cleaner and more accessible for folks with vision impairments and/or reading disabilities such as dyslexia.
Last month, Secretary of State Rubio declared Calibri “woke.” Its use emerged from misguided diversity, equity and inclusion policies pursued by the Biden administration, he said. Calibri is unbefitting the dignity of U.S. Government documents and will no longer be used, he ordered.
Alrighty then. My response would take many, many more words that I’m allotted in this column but boils down to this: Perhaps Marco Rubio should spend his time and energy focusing not on fonts but on things that really matter. Like Russia and Ukraine and China and Iran and Venezuela and Greenland and on and on and on. As Lucas de Groot, who created the Calibri font in 2002 said, “Rubio’s decision is both sad and hilarious.”
So what’s my favorite font? It depends. Some of the markets I write for request Times New Roman, twelve-point, double-spaced. BORING!!! But if that’s what they want, that’s what I give them. If I’m creating a document with a serif type, I vastly prefer Garamond or Century or Book Antiqua. For sans-serif, I really like Aptos, which is the new Microsoft default. Comic Sans and Ink Free and Papyrus are unserious but fun. And it’s cool to mimic cursive handwriting with the Bradley Hand and Freestyle Script and Lucida Handwriting fonts, though I would never send anything written with those fonts to an editor.
But if I ever have occasion to write to Secretary of State Rubio, it will be a snail-mail letter, with an American flag postage stamp firmly affixed to the envelope’s upper-right corner. I will type it using the Calibri font.
You can bet good money on that.
(January 24, 2025)