Ding, Dong, the Font is Dead...

[cybermathwitch]

Hallelujah, saints be praised, ye gods and little fishies woohoo! According to this article at CNet News, Microsoft is getting rid of Times New Roman as the font of choice in Office 2007. (A more indepth article is here at fadtastic.net, and an article with example text in the new font, Cambria (as well as others they're rolling out) is here at Poynter.org. Cambria's pretty. ::G::

Hate hate hate hate hate Times New Roman. I actually have a folder in My Documents on my harddrive called "Times Prison" where I store the damn thing (in case a program just blows up without it) so that it's not in my font folder and my programs are forced to default to their secondary font. I was very luck in college because my professors accepted (and generally preferred) Arial for papers (which, coincidentally, takes up the most room per letter, if you're ever writing a paper based on page count and not word count. Verify, of course, that your teacher/professor will accept it. Many will.)

It's not that it's a serif font, though I do prefer sans-serif in general. (Verdana is my favorite.) I have an abiding love for Courier New, which is a serif font, possibly because my first exposure to fanfiction was reading pages and pages of plain text.

(Because yes, I'm old, and I don't just remember when fanfiction.net was cool, I remember when the Gossamer Project was cool. Back then? There were no nifty publishing apps to make archives out of. You either linked plain .txt files and trusted the author to have followed the formatting codes regarding character-per-line length or you hand coded everything before you put the .html version up. To this day when I write I still lean towards just using *asterisks* to indicate italics. And I have to remember that I can write straight in Word format rather than having to write it in Notepad, check the spelling in Word, and then save the Notepad draft to keep "smart quotes" - evil things - from blowing up in the final output.) And we had to walk uphill both ways to get to the archive. Snerk.

I'm not 100% sure if they're removing it completely or if they're just bumping it as the default standard, but it makes me happy either way. ::G::

sabre_hawke you might be interested in Poynter.org as it is a site for journalists about writing journalism.

Comments

[kurayaminokoe.livejournal.com]

*cough* scuse me... but might I add that people need to keep in mind that the internet isn't just visited by those who speak and write english as a native language, but also by people who aren't as skilled in english as native speakers are and are trying to learn the language. While some people might have the opinion that english is a very easy language to learn (including me), and have english language lessons offered to them, not everyone is that lucky. And even so, I know when I wrote (whether it is crap or not) it helped me learn to write in english better, because in some cases there were people kind enough to point out the errors or give tips on how to make a sentence flow better.

Yes I sometimes wander onto fanfiction.net (and other fanfiction archives) and run across really badly written stories, but sometimes I find very well written stories.

And I know the original commenter might not have meant the (lack of) english language skills as bad fanfiction, because I think i caught slash mentioned somewhere. I'm pretty sure there are some books out there for sale by professional writers that fall in the slash-category, but that'd be the non-serious books of course. Next to the humour and spoof section :)

And for everyone's information, no english isn't my native language at all, thank you very much :) It's Dutch, and I'll welcome all those who wish to write serious fiction to try it in Dutch.. see how hard it is to write in a language that isn't yours. I'm going to take a wild guess but you'll be right up there with what the original commenter labels not serious fanfiction (double cookies if you manage to make it slash).

As a last point (sorry cybermathwitch!!) I used to like communities but I've seen far too many of them end up filled with nothing but elitists saying they're better than other people and it made me sadly remember the old days... where fandoms and communities seemed to be made up of people willing to help other people instead of pointing out flaws.

[cybermathwitch.livejournal.com]

No prob (assuming you were apologizing re: length?) - you bring another very valid point to the table. ::gives more cookies:: I know that if I tried to write something in Japanese, it would suck. A lot.

(And no wonder I haven't been able to find the gay/lesbian books - I was looking in fiction. Silly me.)

[kurayaminokoe.livejournal.com]

yeah, well that and for even commenting to begin with :) It does take a lot of I don't know, courage I would say to write something in a language not your own. But it can also be a great way to learn a language, by using it, and making it a challenge for yourself.

(And yeah, dummy, you have to go over to the non-serious fiction section of the bookstore)

[cybermathwitch.livejournal.com]

::hits self up-side head:: Doh!

And I totally agree about using writing as a language learning tool. I've been seriously considering doing an online comic in Japanese for that very reason.