It seems that the Defense Department is switching fonts from Courier New 12 to Times New Roman 14. This is devestating to college students everywhere that would use Courier New in order to squeak their papers past the 3-page mark in a 3-5 page paper. If a teacher ever objected, they could just say "Hey, it's what the Defense Department uses!"

Okay, well most college students probably didn't know it's what the DoD used. I certainly didn't. I actually never used Courier New because I am so wordy that I always had a lot bigger problem getting under the 5 of a 3-5 page paper. I used a smaller Arial font to bring it down. Of course, you needn't mess with the fonts in order to change the length. You can also bring in or take out the margins or, as I did, change the spacing from double to 1.5, 1.75, or 2.25 (2.5 would raise eyebrows).

Some teachers are on to this, though, and specify. Stupid teachers (and/or profs).

---

I actually prefer Courier New over Times New Roman. Nuke's set-up shows me the original posts in CN and I prefered it to the Times New Roman display that I had until I changed it to Arial and Verdana not too long ago. In some ways, though, my favorite font is Arial Narrow, because you can fit a lot more things on it while (unlike TNR) it remains perfectly legible. Arial and Arial Narrow also look sleaker.

---

Times New Roman 14 is huge. TNR 12 is itself a little too big. The DoD says that they determined that it takes up the same page space, which is true only because Courier New is so wide. Courier New is a fixed-width font, meaning that that an "i" and an "h" take up the same amount of width. It allows for easier spacing and also allows you to make the font small while keeping it spaced enough to be readable.

TNR 14 will arguably be more readable than CN 12, but Arial 10 or another small-type san-serif font is readable and you can get more information on it. TNR 12 is also pretty readable for a serif font.

---

For those of you that don't know, a "serif" font is one that has little bendies at the end of the letters and numbers to make them look more stylized. TNR and CN are both serif fonts. A san-serif font will only have the bendies and perpendiculars to tell the 1's and l's apart, but not much else. A san-serif lower-case "l" is a straight line while a serif one has little perpendicular lines on the top and bottom.

---

My first attempt at a novel was written in Apple IIe font before moving it over to Microsoft Works and Times New Roman. When I set out to rewrite it a couple of years ago, I stuck to the TNR.

My first and third finished novel were written primarily in Arial, though I would play around with the fonts for different items. Typed letters in Courier New, written letters in one of my handwriting fonts, and so on.

---

One of my favorite fonts is Raleigh DmBd BT. I rarely see it anywhere anymore. I'm glad to have it saved, though it can defeat the purpose of having a font if no one else has it. The only things it's good for is printouts (I have no printer) or making pictures. It's a beautiful font, though.

---

One day, a bunch of us old ACMEites were in the parking lot of the Galleria. I was all proud of myself because I had 5,000 new fonds on a CD. I collected fonts at the time and, to an extent, still do. I was quite proud.

"My fonts are better than your fonts!" Zito exclaimed.

"Nuh uh! My fonts are the bestest fonts in the world!" I argued back. "And more, so hah!"

We faux-argued about fonts for a half an hour that I still remember almost ten years later.

---

I'm not the only one fascinated with fonts, it would seem. For instance, here's a Behind the Typeface on Cooper Black.

---

There's also a novel with the slogan "He who dies with the most fonts wins."

I made it about 80 pages into the book before I had to move and lost my place. Someday I'm going to go back and read the whole thing. You can read it for free here. There used to be a way to download the Word document to print it out, but I don't see it anymore. It's very funny in a very odd kind of way.