Fonts come to the forefront

You look at it all the time, yet you seldom see it. No, this is not a variation of the familiar spousal gripe about hearing but not listening, but a comment on fonts — the faces of the letters we read. The Calibri kerfuffle has stirred the typographical pot, engaging the passionate, yet leaving others bemused.

President Trump’s administration has waded in “where no man has gone before” in search of “woke” targets. One of them is Calibri, the font the US State Department adopted in 2023, replacing Times New Roman, to which the department has now reverted.

Calibri, a Microsoft font introduced in 2007 and designed by Dutch typographer Lucas de Groot, dominated Microsoft Office for 17 years before being replaced by Aptos. Both are sans-serif fonts — they lack the flourishes at the edges that make traditional serif fonts, like the one you are reading. Yes, the font used in The Tribune, like most newspapers, is a variation of Times New Roman.

With a father who owned a printing press and the Parkash newspaper, my exposure to typefaces was a given. We used movable lead type, and compositors were given milk as an antidote to toxicity. I saw this tradition continue at The Tribune long after Compugraphic systems replaced Linotype hot metal machines.

Initially meant for print, fonts were adapted for computer screens.

In 1984, I saw how much it mattered. A standout feature of my Mac, other than it being gorgeous, was the Chicago font, a bold sans serif designed for the low-resolution screens of the time. It stood out both on screen and in print, even on ImageWriter dot-matrix printers that ran at just 72 dpi. A Mac printout stood out in a sea of faint dots, something that still held when I joined The Tribune in the 1990s and would bring my copy as a printout. My Mac and their Windows-based machines were incompatible.

In 2007, Calibri exposed the Sharif family in Pakistan. After the Panama Papers scandal, the defence documents submitted were dismissed because they used Calibri, which was not available on the claimed dates.

Coming back to Times New Roman, the font was commissioned in 1931 by The Times of London and designed by Stanley Morison. Aurobind Patel redesigned it in 1991 and created Times Millennium. We in The Tribune were to benefit from his expertise. As a consultant, he redesigned the paper and, as expected, tweaked the font too.

Most readers did not notice the change because fonts do their best work by disappearing. We read without seeing the curves, the spacing, the weight of black on white. And that is as it should be. Fonts exist to serve language, not overshadow it. Whether in a newspaper column, a government order or a school examination paper, it is the words that endure — and the work behind them that ultimately matters.

This Middle by Roopinder Singh was published on the Editorial page of The Tribune on December 17, 2025.

https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/musings/fonts-come-to-the-forefront/