Thread by @bopinion

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has published a notice “to encourage the use of typefaces that are easier to read and to discourage use of Garamond.”

What did Garamond do?! bloom.bg/3fwGsSv

To be fair on the judges, when a big part of your job involves reviewing deadly dull legal briefs, readability matters.

Yet we can’t help but wonder, in all seriousness, whether the court might be making a mistake bloom.bg/3fwGsSv

The D.C. Circuit is worried that use of a narrow font like Garamond allows lawyers to squeeze extra text into mandated page limits. But the font has other virtues:

🖋Elegant
👓High legibility
📄Ideal for reading material that includes continuous text bloom.bg/3fwGsSv

If one’s going to choose a font with serifs, Garamond is easier to read than the Times New Roman and Century fonts the D.C. Circuit prefers

Garamond has a smaller “x-height” — a measure of the size of lower-case letters relative to upper-case letters bloom.bg/3fwGsSv

Research tells us that a large x-height leads to “poor differentiation of certain letter pairs, such as lowercase n and lowercase h”

However, newer studies suggest that for reading serif letters on a screen, a higher x-height may be better bloom.bg/3fwGsSv

Maybe the irritation at Garamond might be a product of the pandemic, with judges and clerks suddenly reading more on laptops.

If that’s the case, the court should ditch serif fonts altogether given that sans serif passages are easier to recall on a screen bloom.bg/3fwGsSv

The D.C. Circuit recommends that documents be submitted in:

Century: A serious-looking font, scores low on legibility
Times New Roman: default “font of least resistance” bloom.bg/3fwGsSv

Ironically, Times New Roman was designed to do exactly what’s stoked the concern about Garamond: enable the Times of London to cram as much text as possible onto its front page.

When the new font was rolled out in the 1930s, many readers weren’t impressed bloom.bg/3fwGsSv

There’s no gain to flouting any court’s typological preferences. Some judges have imposed fines, and courts routinely reject briefs for failure to follow rules on:

📃Word count
📃Typeface
📕Color of the cover bloom.bg/3fwGsSv

But if we’re going to have regulation of acceptable fonts in government offices, especially in those particular offices known as courts, it would be nice to see a thorough discussion of the evidence bloom.bg/3fwGsSv

Which fonts do you prefer to use?