A Font of Discontent

I’m quite particular about my fonts. I spend a long time staring at fonts every day due to my job so it’s no surprise that I’m picky. I know the importance of readable type.

 

That’s why the Calibri font annoys me. I don’t understand why it’s the default font for Word and I have a hard time switching the default font to something I want to use. Most authors send their articles to me in Calibri, I guess because they’re not picky and just use what automatically pops up (I don’t encourage authors to do a lot of formatting anyway because we’re just going to change everything to adhere to our style, so they’re wasting their time).

 

I have a hard time reading Calibri. Something about the serifs throws off my cursor: I put the cursor in the text to delete something but the cursor is often next to where I want it to go so I accidentally delete something else. For some reason, it’s also hard for me to tell in Calibri if there are two spaces after a period. That’s a problem because if you’re writing something that’s being professionally published, you should never ever use two spaces after a period for various reasons. It’s no longer 1979. (Legal and government documents seem to have made an exception for themselves but every book and newspaper uses one space after a period.)

 

Anyway, when I’m writing or editing in Word, I always use plain old Helvetica, 12 points. Helvetica is clean and classic and doesn’t call attention to itself. It’s easier for me to read and lets me pay attention to the substance of the text and not the formatting. I’m having this weird problem now with all my Helvetica bold text displaying as gibberish in Word. It’s something to do with the font app I downloaded that was supposed to fix another problem.

 

I have access to a lot of fonts because of my job but it’s annoying that Helvetica doesn’t seem to come standard with the basic versions of Office and the like. Scroll down far enough in Word and you really get down to the font dregs. I mean, Diwan Thuluth? Gujarati Sangam MT? What the hell are these and when would you ever, ever use them?

 

No, I’ll just stick with classic fonts that are easy to read. I like Helvetica, Bembo, Futura, etc. I like some of the fonts that you can use to evoke the past, like Cooper or Peignot.

 

I stay away from anything that looks like somebody used it to design a flyer for Casino Night. Comic Sans should only be used for an event involving young children. Papyrus is only appropriate for a menu for a restaurant that only serves wraps. Fonts like Funkhouse might say “fun” but they look like ass. A lot of script or novelty fonts are illegible. Impact just reminds me of memes. And don’t get me started on …

 

… Hey, wake up! How long were you out? Mid-second paragraph, as far as I can tell.