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104-454: Times New Roman is a serif typeface commissioned for use by the British newspaper The Times in 1931, but has now become one of the most popular typefaces of all time and is installed on most personal computers . The typeface was conceived by Stanley Morison , the artistic adviser to the British branch of the printing equipment company Monotype , in collaboration with Victor Lardent ,

208-497: A Greek nu. The 4-line system involved casting characters for 10-point Times Roman on 6-point bodies . The top of the character would overhang the slug, forming a kern which was less fragile than the normal kerns of foundry type, as it was on a slab of cast metal. This technique had been in previous use on Monotype machines, usually involving double-height matrices, to allow the automatic setting of "advertising figures" (numbers that occupy two or more lines, usually to clearly indicate

312-468: A basis for the design, and Times New Roman mostly matches Plantin's dimensions. The main change was that the contrast between strokes was enhanced to give a crisper image. The new design made its debut in The Times on 3 October 1932. After one year, the design was released for commercial sale. In Times New Roman's name, Roman is a reference to the regular or roman style (sometimes also called Antiqua ),

416-653: A close connection with the Times that would last throughout his life. Morison edited the History of the Times from 1935 to 1952, and in the post-war period, at a time when Monotype effectively stopped developing new typefaces due to pressures of austerity , took a post as editor of the Times Literary Supplement which he held from 1945 to 1948. Times New Roman remained Morison's only type design; he designed

520-553: A division made on the Vox-ATypI classification system. Nonetheless, some have argued that the difference is excessively abstract, hard to spot except to specialists and implies a clearer separation between styles than originally appeared. Modern typefaces such as Arno and Trinité may fuse both styles. Early "humanist" roman types were introduced in Italy. Modelled on the script of the period, they tend to feature an "e" in which

624-421: A format change from broadsheet to tabloid in 2004. Times New Roman has a robust colour on the page and influences of European early modern and Baroque printing. As a typeface designed for newspaper printing, Times New Roman has a high x-height , short descenders to allow tight linespacing and a relatively condensed appearance. (Although Hutt, and most other authors, describe Times New Roman as having

728-551: A higher x-height than Plantin, Tracy reports based on published Monotype dimensions that in the original small metal-type sizes the difference was not great.) The roman style of Plantin was loosely based on a metal type created in the late sixteenth century by the French artisan Robert Granjon and preserved in the collection of the Plantin-Moretus Museum of Antwerp . This style is sometimes categorised as part of

832-520: A left-inclining curve axis with weight stress at about 8 and 2 o'clock; serifs are almost always bracketed (they have curves connecting the serif to the stroke); head serifs are often angled. Old-style faces evolved over time, showing increasing abstraction from what would now be considered handwriting and blackletter characteristics, and often increased delicacy or contrast as printing technique improved. Old-style faces have often sub-divided into 'Venetian' (or ' humanist ') and ' Garalde ' (or 'Aldine'),

936-428: A lettering artist in The Times's advertising department. Asked to advise on a redesign, Morison recommended that The Times change their text typeface from a spindly nineteenth-century face to a more robust, solid design, returning to traditions of printing from the eighteenth century and before. This matched a common trend in printing tastes of the period. Morison proposed an older Monotype typeface named Plantin as

1040-534: A memo that he hoped for a design that would have relatively sharp serifs, matching the general design of the Times' previous font, but on a darker and more traditional basic structure. Bulked-up versions of Monotype's pre-existing but rather dainty Baskerville and Perpetua typefaces were considered for a basis, and the Legibility Group designs were also examined. (Perpetua, which Monotype had recently commissioned from sculptor Eric Gill at Morison's urging,

1144-492: A normal newspaper column frequent paragraph breaks tend to provide area that can absorb the space of wider letters without increasing the number of lines used–but The Times , whose house style in the 1930s was to minimise the number of paragraph breaks, was an exception to this. A number of early reviews of Times New Roman were published in Morison's lifetime that discussed aspects of its design. Most were appreciative (Morison

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1248-503: A price in an advertisement set in small type). This meant that the same matrix could be used for both superscript and subscript numbers. More importantly, it allowed a variable or other item to have both a superscript and a subscript at the same time, one above the other, without inordinate difficulty. Previously, while the Monotype system, due to its flexibility, was widely used for setting mathematical formulas, Monotype's Modern Series 7

1352-413: A prominent type designer who worked on a redesign of Times in the 1970s and wrote an analysis of its design in his book Letters of Credit (1986), commented that its arrival must at least have influenced the decision to consider a redesign. The development of Times New Roman was relatively involved due to the lack of a specific pre-existing model – or perhaps a surfeit of possible choices. Morison wrote in

1456-439: A reason that sharper serifs looked better after stereotyping or printed on a rotary press . Although Morison may not have literally drawn the design, his influence on its concept was sufficient that he felt he could call it "my one effort at designing a font" in a letter to Daniel Berkeley Updike , a prominent American printing historian with whom he corresponded frequently. Morison's several accounts of his reasoning in designing

1560-409: A redesign, however noted that the design's compression and fine detail extending to the edge of the matrices was not ideal in the aggressive conditions of most newspaper printing, in which the Times was unusual for its particularly high standard of printing suiting its luxury market. Users found that in the hot metal period it was common for the molten metal to rapidly eat through the matrices as type

1664-403: A sans serif font versus a serif font. When size of an individual glyph is 9–20 pixels, proportional serifs and some lines of most glyphs of common vector fonts are smaller than individual pixels. Hinting , spatial anti-aliasing , and subpixel rendering allow to render distinguishable serifs even in this case, but their proportions and appearance are off and thickness is close to many lines of

1768-580: A slash, Times New Roman does not). Monotype's 'J' is non-descending, but Linotype's in the bold weight descends below the baseline. Linotype's metal version of Times had a shrunken 'f' due to a technical limitation of the Linotype system—it could not cast a kerning 'f', one that extended into the space of surrounding letters. This restriction was removed in the digital version. Linotype licensed its version to Xerox and then Adobe and Apple , guaranteeing its importance in digital printing by making it one of

1872-422: A softened version of the same basic design, with reduced contrast. Didone typefaces achieved dominance of printing in the early 19th-century printing before declining in popularity in the second half of the century and especially in the 20th as new designs and revivals of old-style faces emerged. In print, Didone fonts are often used on high-gloss magazine paper for magazines such as Harper's Bazaar , where

1976-476: A specimen to use to design the typeface, but he told Moran that he remembered working on the design from archive photographs of vintage type; he thought this was a book printed by Christophe Plantin , the sixteenth-century printer whose printing office the Plantin-Moretus Museum preserves and is named for. Moran and Tracy suggested that this actually might have been the same specimen of type from

2080-614: A straight-sided 'M' and an increased level of contrast between thick and thin strokes, so it has often been compared to fonts from the late eighteenth century, the so-called ' transitional ' genre, in particular the Baskerville typeface of the 1750s. Historian and sometime Monotype executive Allan Haley commented that compared to Plantin "serifs had been sharpened...contrast was increased and character curves were refined," while Lawson described Times's higher-contrast crispness as having "a sparkle [Plantin] never achieved". Morison described

2184-403: A stroke written with a quill) and old-style C and W; Tracy suggests Monotype's previous Poliphilus design as an influence. Named after Hever Castle , the home of the Times' owner Lord Astor and designed early on, it was used by the Times for headings in the lighter sections such as society pages , arts and fashion. It has not been digitised. A variant intended for book printing, avoiding

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2288-545: A type to be issued by the Bauer Type Foundry of Frankfurt but the project was abandoned due to the war. Morison told his friend Ellic Howe that the test type sent to him just before the war was sent to the government to be "analysed in order that we should know whether the Hun is hard up for lead or antimony or tin." Brooke Crutchley , Printer to Cambridge University, recorded in his diary a more informal discussion of

2392-608: A typeface that Compugraphic Corporation had plagiarized from Linotype and leased to Microsoft . Times New Roman with support for Arabic was first published in the Arabic version of Windows 3.1x . Also known as Times New Roman World, this is originally based on the version of Times New Roman bundled with Windows Vista . It includes fonts in WGL character sets, Hebrew and Arabic characters. Similar to Helvetica World , Arabic in italic fonts are in roman positions. Monotype further sells

2496-401: A vertical stress and thin serifs with a constant width, with minimal bracketing (constant width). Serifs tend to be very thin, and vertical lines very heavy. Didone fonts are often considered to be less readable than transitional or old-style serif typefaces. Period examples include Bodoni , Didot , and Walbaum . Computer Modern is a popular contemporary example. The very popular Century is

2600-567: A wider range of styles and optical sizes in order to meet the needs of newspapers and books which print at a range of text sizes. This is the digitalisation of Linotype's Times (see above). It is pre-installed on macOS but not on iOS, and is also widely available for purchase. Times provides standard ligature for "fi", but it does not provide any ligature for "Th". Like Monotype, Linotype released additional versions of Times for different text sizes. These include: The Times newspaper has commissioned various successors to Times New Roman: In 1994

2704-493: Is commonly used on headings, websites, signs and billboards. A Japanese-language font designed in imitation of western serifs also exists. Farang Ses, designed in 1913, was the first Thai typeface to employ thick and thin strokes reflecting old-style serif Latin typefaces, and became extremely popular, with its derivatives widely used into the digital age. (Examples: Angsana UPC, Kinnari ) Harry Carter (typographer) Harry Graham Carter (27 March 1901 – 10 March 1982)

2808-424: Is considered a 'transitional' design in aesthetic, although it does not revive any specific model.) Walter Tracy, who knew Lardent, suggested in the 1980s that "Morison did not begin with a clear vision of the ultimate type, but felt his way along." Morison's biographer Nicolas Barker has written that Morison's memos of the time wavered over a variety of options before it was ultimately concluded that Plantin formed

2912-469: Is ended with a dipping motion of the brush, the ending of horizontal strokes are also thickened . These design forces resulted in the current Song typeface characterized by thick vertical strokes contrasted with thin horizontal strokes, triangular ornaments at the end of single horizontal strokes, and overall geometrical regularity. In Japanese typography, the equivalent of serifs on kanji and kana characters are called uroko —"fish scales". In Chinese,

3016-633: Is that serifs were devised to neaten the ends of lines as they were chiselled into stone. The origin of the word 'serif' is obscure, but apparently is almost as recent as the type style. The book The British Standard of the Capital Letters contained in the Roman Alphabet, forming a complete code of systematic rules for a mathematical construction and accurate formation of the same (1813) by William Hollins , defined 'surripses', usually pronounced "surriphs", as "projections which appear at

3120-488: Is the printed capital I , where the addition of serifs distinguishes the character from lowercase L (l). The printed capital J and the numeral 1 are also often handwritten with serifs. Below are some images of serif letterforms across history: In the Chinese and Japanese writing systems, there are common type styles based on the regular script for Chinese characters akin to serif and sans serif fonts in

3224-499: Is the past tense of schrijven (to write). The relation between schreef and schrappen is documented by Van Veen and Van der Sijs. In her book Chronologisch Woordenboek , Van der Sijs lists words by first known publication in the language area that is the Netherlands today: The OED ' s earliest citation for "grotesque" in this sense is 1875, giving 'stone-letter' as a synonym . It would seem to mean "out of

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3328-608: The Oxford English Dictionary ( OED ) are 1830 for 'serif' and 1841 for 'sans serif'. The OED speculates that 'serif' was a back-formation from 'sanserif'. Webster's Third New International Dictionary traces 'serif' to the Dutch noun schreef , meaning "line, stroke of the pen", related to the verb schrappen , "to delete, strike through" ( 'schreef' now also means "serif" in Dutch). Yet, schreef

3432-671: The American Psychological Association suggests using Times New Roman in papers written in its APA style . The U.S. Department of State used Times New Roman as the standard font in its official documents from 2004 to 2023, before switching to Calibri . The Australian Government logo used Times New Roman Bold as a wordmark for departments and agencies are required to use common branding on their websites and print publications. Monotype originally created Times New Roman for its typesetting machines, but its rival Linotype rapidly began to offer its version of

3536-508: The Didone, or "modern" type of the early nineteenth century (and with the more recent 'Ionic' styles of type influenced by it that were offered by Linotype, discussed below). Some commentators have found Times' bold unsatisfactory and too condensed, such as Walter Tracy. During the nineteenth century, the standard roman types for general-purpose printing were "Modern" or Didone designs, and these were standard in all newspaper printing. Designs in

3640-475: The Janson and Ehrhardt types based on his work and Caslon , especially the larger sizes. Transitional, or baroque, serif typefaces first became common around the mid-18th century until the start of the 19th. They are in between "old style" and "modern" fonts, thus the name "transitional". Differences between thick and thin lines are more pronounced than they are in old style, but less dramatic than they are in

3744-524: The germanophone world, with the Antiqua–Fraktur dispute often dividing along ideological or political lines. After the mid-20th century, Fraktur fell out of favor and Antiqua-based typefaces became the official standard in Germany. (In German, the term "Antiqua" refers to serif typefaces. ) A new genre of serif type developed around the 17th century in the Netherlands and Germany that came to be called

3848-429: The wood grain on printing blocks ran horizontally, it was fairly easy to carve horizontal lines with the grain. However, carving vertical or slanted patterns was difficult because those patterns intersect with the grain and break easily. This resulted in a typeface that has thin horizontal strokes and thick vertical strokes . In accordance with Chinese calligraphy ( kaiti style in particular), where each horizontal stroke

3952-506: The " old-style " of serif fonts (from before the eighteenth century). (The 'a' of Plantin was not based on Granjon's work: the Plantin-Moretus Museum's type had a substitute 'a' cut later.) Indeed, the working title of Times New Roman was "Times Old Style". However, Times New Roman modifies the Granjon influence further than Plantin due to features such as its 'a' and 'e', with very large counters and apertures , its ball terminal detailing,

4056-456: The "Dutch taste" ( "goût Hollandois" in French ). It was a tendency towards denser, more solid typefaces, often with a high x-height (tall lower-case letters) and a sharp contrast between thick and thin strokes, perhaps influenced by blackletter faces. Artists in the "Dutch taste" style include Hendrik van den Keere , Nicolaas Briot, Christoffel van Dijck , Miklós Tótfalusi Kis and

4160-617: The "Latin" style include Wide Latin , Copperplate Gothic , Johnston Delf Smith and the more restrained Méridien . Serifed fonts are widely used for body text because they are considered easier to read than sans-serif fonts in print. Colin Wheildon, who conducted scientific studies from 1982 to 1990, found that sans serif fonts created various difficulties for readers that impaired their comprehension. According to Kathleen Tinkel, studies suggest that "most sans serif typefaces may be slightly less legible than most serif faces, but ...

4264-457: The "M"; Cloister is an exception. Antiqua ( / æ n ˈ t iː k w ə / ) is a style of typeface used to mimic styles of handwriting or calligraphy common during the 15th and 16th centuries. Letters are designed to flow, and strokes connect together in a continuous fashion; in this way it is often contrasted with Fraktur -style typefaces where the individual strokes are broken apart. The two typefaces were used alongside each other in

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4368-471: The "discretionary ligatures" feature will provide ligatures for "fi" and "Th". More complex Unicode ligatures like "ffi" and "ft" are also available. A previous version of Times New Roman was also distributed as part of Microsoft's Core Fonts for the Web package. When the system font Times New Roman was expanded to support Arabic script , it was complemented with the Arabic character set from Simplified Arabic ,

4472-497: The 1530s onwards. Often lighter on the page and made in larger sizes than had been used for roman type before, French Garalde faces rapidly spread throughout Europe from the 1530s to become an international standard. Also during this period, italic type evolved from a quite separate genre of type, intended for informal uses such as poetry, into taking a secondary role for emphasis. Italics moved from being conceived as separate designs and proportions to being able to be fitted into

4576-559: The 1920s, some in the publishing industry felt that the modern-face model was too spindly and high-contrast for optimal legibility at the small sizes and punishing printing techniques of newspaper printing. In 1925, the Mergenthaler Linotype Company, Monotype's main competitor, launched a new newspaper typeface called Ionic, which became the first in a series known as the Legibility Group . These kept to

4680-504: The 4‑line system for mathematics developed by Monotype in 1957. This modified version of Times Roman was designed for use as part of Monotype's 4-line Mathematics system. The major changes to the Times Roman typeface itself were a reduction in the slope of italic characters to 12 degrees from 16 degrees, so as to reduce the need for kerning, and a change in the form of italic v and w so that italic v could be more easily distinguished from

4784-494: The Didone fonts that followed. Stress is more likely to be vertical, and often the "R" has a curled tail. The ends of many strokes are marked not by blunt or angled serifs but by ball terminals . Transitional faces often have an italic 'h' that opens outwards at bottom right. Because the genre bridges styles, it is difficult to define where the genre starts and ends. Many of the most popular transitional designs are later creations in

4888-746: The Monotype Corporation worked briefly at the Kynoch Press in Birmingham. In 1931 he and Herbert Simon published Printing Explained . From 1936 to 1938 he worked at the Nonesuch Press in London, as Meynell's book-designer. His son, Matthew Carter , was born in 1937. In 1937, Carter, Ellic Howe , Alfred F. Johnson , Stanley Morison and Graham Pollard started to produce a list of all known pre-1800 type specimens. The list

4992-431: The Plantin-Moretus Museum that Plantin had been based on. (Although Plantin is based on a Granjon type in the collection of the museum, that specific type was only acquired by Plantin's heirs after his death.) The sharpened serifs somewhat recall Perpetua, although Morison's stated reason for them was to provide continuity with the previous Didone design and the crispness associated with the Times' printing; he also cited as

5096-666: The West. In Mainland China, the most popular category of serifed-like typefaces for body text is called Song ( 宋体 , Songti ); in Japan, the most popular serif style is called Minchō ( 明朝 ) ; and in Taiwan and Hong Kong, it is called Ming ( 明體 , Mingti ). The names of these lettering styles come from the Song and Ming dynasties, when block printing flourished in China. Because

5200-625: The answer was really Times and that if he worked out the problem from the bottom that was the sort of answer he would get...Will has been experimenting with Plantin, but it doesn't come out well when printed from plates on rotaries, perhaps a face based on Plantin would do the trick. M said that was just how he got to Times. A large number of variants of Times were cut during the metal type period, in particular families of titling capitals for headlines. Walter Tracy in Letters of Credit , Allen Hutt and others have discussed these extensively in their works on

5304-473: The best basis for a condensed font that could nonetheless be made to fill out the full size of the letter space as far as possible. (Morison ultimately conceded that Perpetua, which had been his pet project, was 'too basically circular' to be practical to condense in an attractive way.) Walter Tracy and James Moran, who discussed the design's creation with Lardent in the 1960s, found that Lardent himself had little memory of exactly what material Morison gave him as

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5408-419: The claim had begun as a prank. In 2010, Mark Owens described Parker's article in retrospect as "the scantest of evidence" and a "fog of irrelevant details". Monotype executive Dan Rhatigan described the theory as implausible in 2011: "I'll admit that I tend to side with the more fully documented (both in general, and in agreement with what little I can find within Monotype to support it) notion that Times New Roman

5512-488: The clear, bold nature of the large serifs, slab serif designs are often used for posters and in small print. Many monospace fonts , on which all characters occupy the same amount of horizontal space as in a typewriter , are slab-serif designs. While not always purely slab-serif designs, many fonts intended for newspaper use have large slab-like serifs for clearer reading on poor-quality paper. Many early slab-serif types, being intended for posters, only come in bold styles with

5616-489: The companion italic as also being influenced by the typefaces created by the Didot family in the late 18th and early 19th centuries: a "rationalistic italic that owed nothing to the tradition of the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries. It has, indeed, more in common with the eighteenth century." Morison had several years earlier attracted attention for promoting the radical idea that italics in book printing were too disruptive to

5720-543: The concept of Times New Roman were somewhat contradictory and historians of printing have suggested that in practice they were mostly composed to rationalise his pre-existing aesthetic preferences: after Morison's death Allen Hutt went so far as to describe his unsigned 1936 article on the topic as "rather odd...it can only be regarded as a piece of Morisonian mystification". Lardent's original drawings are according to Rhatigan lost, but photographs exist of his drawings. Rhatigan comments that Lardent's originals show "the spirit of

5824-591: The core fonts of the PostScript page description language. Microsoft's version of Times New Roman is licensed from Monotype, hence the original name. For compatibility, Monotype had to subtly redraw their design to match the widths from the Adobe/Linotype version. Versions of Times New Roman from Monotype (discussed below) exist which vary from the PostScript metrics. Linotype applied for registration of

5928-499: The cover of the Monotype Recorder compared the new "Times New Roman" with a sample of the previous type labelled as "Times Old Roman", some writers have assumed that the Times' previous typeface was actually called this, which it was not.) An early user of Times New Roman outside its origin was by Daniel Berkeley Updike, an influential historian of printing with whom Morison carried an extensive correspondence. Impressed by

6032-500: The cross stroke is angled, not horizontal; an "M" with two-way serifs; and often a relatively dark colour on the page. In modern times, that of Nicolas Jenson has been the most admired, with many revivals. Garaldes, which tend to feature a level cross-stroke on the "e", descend from an influential 1495 font cut by engraver Francesco Griffo for printer Aldus Manutius , which became the inspiration for many typefaces cut in France from

6136-500: The design's origins from a conversation in the late 1940s: SM thought that Dreyfus might in time be able to design a mathematical font but he would first have to get out of his system a lot of personal ideas and searching for effects. He, Morison, had to do all this before he could design the Times font. Will Carter came in to consult M about a new type for the Radio Times , on which he had been invited to experiment. M said that

6240-500: The design, he used it to set his book Some Aspects of Printing, Old and New . It then was chosen by the Crowell-Collier magazines Woman's Home Companion and then its sister publications such as Collier's . A brochure was published to mark the change along with a letter from Morison hoping that the redesign would be a success. Ultimately it became Monotype's best-selling metal type of all time. Walter Tracy, who worked on

6344-474: The difference can be offset by careful setting". Sans-serif are considered to be more legible on computer screens. According to Alex Poole, "we should accept that most reasonably designed typefaces in mainstream use will be equally legible". A study suggested that serif fonts are more legible on a screen but are not generally preferred to sans serif fonts. Another study indicated that comprehension times for individual words are slightly faster when written in

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6448-545: The earlier "modernised old styles" have been described as transitional in design. Later 18th-century transitional typefaces in Britain begin to show influences of Didone typefaces from Europe, described below, and the two genres blur, especially in type intended for body text; Bell is an example of this. Didone, or modern, serif typefaces, which first emerged in the late 18th century, are characterized by extreme contrast between thick and thin lines. These typefaces have

6552-401: The family. Monotype also created some caps-only 'titling' designs to match Times New Roman itself, which was intended for body text. These are not sold by Monotype in digital format, although Linotype's Times Eighteen in the same style (see below) is. An elegant titling caps design, quite different from Times New Roman with a Caslon-style A (with a serif at top left of the letter, suggesting

6656-460: The final type, but not the details." The design was adapted from Lardent's large drawings by the Monotype drawing office team in Salfords , Surrey , which worked out spacing and simplified some fine details. Further changes were made after manufacturing began (the latter a difficult practice, since new punches and matrices had to be machined after each design change). Morison continued to develop

6760-615: The first official Greek writings on stone and in Latin alphabet with inscriptional lettering —words carved into stone in Roman antiquity . The explanation proposed by Father Edward Catich in his 1968 book The Origin of the Serif is now broadly but not universally accepted: the Roman letter outlines were first painted onto stone, and the stone carvers followed the brush marks, which flared at stroke ends and corners, creating serifs. Another theory

6864-616: The first part of the Times New Roman family to be designed. Roman type has roots in Italian printing of the late 15th and early 16th centuries, but Times New Roman's design has no connection to Rome or to the Romans . The Times stayed with the original Times New Roman for 40 years. The paper subsequently has switched typefaces five times between 1972 and 2007 to different variants of the original due to new production techniques and

6968-447: The flow of text, and should be phased out. He rapidly came to concede that the idea was impractical, and later wryly commented to historian Harry Carter that Times' italic "owes more to Didot than dogma." Morison wrote in a personal letter of Times New Roman's mixed heritage that it "has the merit of not looking as if it had been designed by somebody in particular." Rather than creating a companion boldface with letterforms similar to

7072-526: The idea and Monotype shelved the sketches, ultimately reusing them as a basis for Times New Roman. Giampa claimed that he stumbled upon original material in 1987, after he had purchased Lanston Monotype, and that some of the papers that had been his evidence had been lost in a flood at his house, while Parker claimed that an additional source was material in a section of the Smithsonian now closed due to asbestos contamination. Giampa asked Parker to complete

7176-418: The key differentiation being width, and often have no lower-case letters at all. Examples of slab-serif typefaces include Clarendon , Rockwell , Archer , Courier , Excelsior , TheSerif , and Zilla Slab . FF Meta Serif and Guardian Egyptian are examples of newspaper and small print-oriented typefaces with some slab-serif characteristics, often most visible in the bold weights. In the late 20th century,

7280-446: The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw a return to the designs of Renaissance printers and type-founders, many of whose names and designs are still used today. Old-style type is characterized by a lack of large differences between thick and thin lines (low line contrast) and generally, but less often, by a diagonal stress (the thinnest parts of letters are at an angle rather than at the top and bottom). An old-style font normally has

7384-475: The main glyph, strongly altering appearance of the glyph. Consequently, it is sometimes advised to use sans-serif fonts for content meant to be displayed on screens, as they scale better for low resolutions. Indeed, most web pages employ sans-serif type. Recent introduction of desktop displays with 300+ dpi resolution might eventually make this recommendation obsolete. As serifs originated in inscription, they are generally not used in handwriting. A common exception

7488-729: The name Times is trademarked, the design itself is in many countries not copyrightable . Notably, the United States allows alternative interpretations if they do not reuse digital data. There are some free software fonts used as alternatives, including metric-compatible designs used for font substitution . Serif Serif typefaces can be broadly classified into one of four subgroups: § old style , § transitional , § Didone and § Slab Serif , in order of first appearance. Some Old-style typefaces can be classified further into one of two subgroups: § Antiqua and § Dutch Taste . Serifs originated from

7592-501: The nineteenth-century model but greatly reduced the contrast of the letterform. The thinnest strokes of the letter were made thicker and strokes were kept as far apart as possible to maximise legibility. It proved extremely successful: Allen Hutt , Monotype's newspaper printing consultant in the late 1930s, later noted that it "revolutionized newspaper text setting...within eighteen months it was adopted by 3,000 papers." Although Times New Roman does not in any way resemble it, Walter Tracy ,

7696-546: The nineteenth-century style remain a common part of the aesthetic of newspaper printing; for example in 2017 digital typeface designer Tobias Frere-Jones wrote that he kept his Exchange family, designed for the Wall Street Journal , based on the nineteenth-century model as it "had to feel like the news." According to Mosley and Williamson the modern-face used by The Times was Monotype's Series 7 or "Modern Extended", based on typefaces by Miller and Richard . By

7800-681: The ordinary" in this usage, as in art 'grotesque' usually means "elaborately decorated". Other synonyms include "Doric" and "Gothic", commonly used for Japanese Gothic typefaces . Old-style typefaces date back to 1465, shortly after Johannes Gutenberg 's adoption of the movable type printing press . Early printers in Italy created types that broke with Gutenberg's blackletter printing, creating upright and later italic styles inspired by Renaissance calligraphy. Old-style serif fonts have remained popular for setting body text because of their organic appearance and excellent readability on rough book paper. The increasing interest in early printing during

7904-555: The paper retains the detail of their high contrast well, and for whose image a crisp, "European" design of type may be considered appropriate. They are used more often for general-purpose body text, such as book printing, in Europe. They remain popular in the printing of Greek, as the Didot family were among the first to establish a printing press in newly independent Greece. The period of Didone types' greatest popularity coincided with

8008-578: The printing historian Mike Parker published claims that the design of Times New Roman's roman or regular style was based on a 1904 design of William Starling Burgess . This theory remains controversial. Parker and his friend Gerald Giampa , a Canadian printer who had bought up the defunct American branch of Lanston Monotype, claimed that, in 1904, Burgess created a type design for company documents at his shipyard in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and hired Lanston Monotype to issue it. However, Burgess abandoned

8112-421: The rapid spread of printed posters and commercial ephemera and the arrival of bold type . As a result, many Didone typefaces are among the earliest designed for "display" use, with an ultra-bold " fat face " style becoming a common sub-genre. Slab serif typefaces date to about 1817. Originally intended as attention-grabbing designs for posters, they have very thick serifs, which tend to be as thick as

8216-448: The requirements of a good small type [but] Times Roman, which most people find the easiest to read of small text-types, runs counter to some of them...[Morison] avoided blunt serifs and thickened hairlines because he found they wore down more noticeably than sharper-cut features." Times New Roman remains popular in publishing, helped by the extremely large range of characters available for international and mathematics printing. For example,

8320-406: The roman style, Times New Roman's bold has a different character, with a more condensed and more upright effect caused by making the horizontal parts of curves consistently the thinnest lines of each letter, and making the top serifs of letters like 'd' purely horizontal. This effect is not found in sixteenth-century typefaces (which, in any case, did not have bold versions); it is most associated with

8424-683: The same line as roman type with a design complementary to it. Examples of contemporary Garalde old-style typefaces are Bembo , Garamond , Galliard , Granjon , Goudy Old Style , Minion , Palatino , Renard, Sabon , and Scala . Contemporary typefaces with Venetian old style characteristics include Cloister , Adobe Jenson , the Golden Type , Hightower Text , Centaur , Goudy's Italian Old Style and Berkeley Old Style and ITC Legacy. Several of these blend in Garalde influences to fit modern expectations, especially placing single-sided serifs on

8528-579: The same style. Fonts from the original period of transitional typefaces include early on the " romain du roi " in France, then the work of Pierre Simon Fournier in France, Fleischman and Rosart in the Low Countries, Pradell in Spain and John Baskerville and Bulmer in England. Among more recent designs, Times New Roman (1932), Perpetua , Plantin , Mrs. Eaves , Freight Text , and

8632-566: The serifs are called either yǒujiǎotǐ ( 有脚体 , lit. "forms with legs") or yǒuchènxiàntǐ ( 有衬线体 , lit. "forms with ornamental lines"). The other common East Asian style of type is called black ( 黑体/體 , Hēitǐ ) in Chinese and Gothic ( ゴシック体 , Goshikku-tai ) in Japanese. This group is characterized by lines of even thickness for each stroke, the equivalent of "sans serif". This style, first introduced on newspaper headlines,

8736-436: The slight condensation of the original Times New Roman. Although it was popular in the metal type period for book printing, it was apparently never digitised. Monotype also created a version, series 627, with long descenders more appropriate to classic book typography. Optional text figures were also available. Monotype also produced Series 727, in which the heavier strokes of upper-case letters were made slightly thinner. This

8840-623: The term "humanist slab-serif" has been applied to typefaces such as Chaparral , Caecilia and Tisa, with strong serifs but an outline structure with some influence of old-style serif typefaces. During the 19th century, genres of serif type besides conventional body text faces proliferated. These included "Tuscan" faces, with ornamental, decorative ends to the strokes rather than serifs, and "Latin" or "wedge-serif" faces, with pointed serifs, which were particularly popular in France and other parts of Europe including for signage applications such as business cards or shop fronts. Well-known typefaces in

8944-651: The tops and bottoms of some letters, the O and Q excepted, at the beginning or end, and sometimes at each, of all". The standard also proposed that 'surripsis' may be a Greek word derived from σῠν- ( 'syn-' , "together") and ῥῖψῐς ( 'rhîpsis' , "projection"). In 1827, Greek scholar Julian Hibbert printed with his own experimental uncial Greek types, remarking that the types of Giambattista Bodoni 's Callimachus were "ornamented (or rather disfigured) by additions of what [he] believe[s] type-founders call syrifs or cerefs". The printer Thomas Curson Hansard referred to them as "ceriphs" in 1825. The oldest citations in

9048-523: The trademark name Times Roman and received registration status in 1945. Monotype has released at least eight digital typefaces under the name Times New Roman. Since Windows 3.1, all versions of Microsoft Windows include Times New Roman. Version 6.87 of this typeface is available for purchase under the name Times New Roman OS (see below). The current 7.03 version of Windows' Times New Roman includes small capitals , text figures, and italic swash capitals . It omits automatic ligature insertion, but enabling

9152-456: The two foundries, as the proportions and details as well as the width metrics for their version of Times grew apart. Differences between the two versions do occur in the lowercase z in the italic weight (Times Linotype has a curl also followed in the STIX revival, Times New Roman is straight), and in the percent sign in all weights (Linotype and STIX have a stroke connecting up the left-hand zero with

9256-493: The type from the limited number of surviving letters, which was issued in June 2009 by Font Bureau under the name of 'Starling'. Reception to the claims was sceptical, with dismissal from Morison's biographer Nicolas Barker and Luc Devroye among others; Barker suggested that the material had been fabricated in order to aid Giampa in embarrassing Monotype's British branch, while Devroye and Thomas Phinney of FontLab suggested that

9360-416: The typeface in their trade magazine, The Monotype Recorder , and took advantage of this popularity by cutting a widened version, Series 427, for book publishing, although many books ultimately used the original version. The first known book published in Times New Roman (the original 327 Monotype series) was Minnow Among Tritons , published by the Nonesuch Press and printed by R&R Clark in 1934. (Because

9464-437: The typeface with subtle differences. A key reason is that many newspapers, including The Times , also used Linotype equipment for production. Linotype referred to its design as Times or Times Roman . Monotype and Linotype have since merged, but the lineage of Times has been split into two subtly different designs since its earliest days. Although Times New Roman and Times are very similar, various differences developed between

9568-402: The versions marketed by Linotype and Monotype when the master fonts were transferred from metal to photo and digital media. For example, Linotype has slanted serifs on the capital S, while Monotype's are vertical, and Linotype has an extra serif on the number 5. Most of these differences are invisible in body text at normal reading distances, or 10pts at 300 dpi. Subtle competition grew between

9672-459: The vertical lines themselves. Slab serif fonts vary considerably: some such as Rockwell have a geometric design with minimal variation in stroke width—they are sometimes described as sans-serif fonts with added serifs. Others such as those of the "Clarendon" model have a structure more like most other serif fonts, though with larger and more obvious serifs. These designs may have bracketed serifs that increase width along their length. Because of

9776-420: Was an English typographer , translator and writer. He was a well-known historian of type. He was the father of type designer Matthew Carter . Carter studied at the progressive Bedales School (where he was a friend of John Rothenstein), and at The Queen's College, Oxford "where he became competent in French, German, Spanish, and Russian". (He would later learn Arabic, and design a Hebrew font.) Though he

9880-471: Was an influential figure in publishing) but several noted that it did not follow conventional expectations of newspaper typeface design. One article that discussed its design was Optical Scale in Typefounding , written by Harry Carter and published in 1937, which discussed the differences between small and large-size typeface designs. He commented "The small sizes of Plantin embody what are supposed to be

9984-420: Was archivist and assistant to Stanley Morison as Morison worked on John Fell , published in 1967. He also cataloged thousands of matrices, punches, and fonts for the Plantin-Moretus Museum , and assisted Charles Enschede with his Typefoundries in the Netherlands . Carter was the author and editor of books and articles on typography and the history of type. Notable among his writings are, The Wolvercote Mill:

10088-486: Was based on Plantin...I won't rule out the possibility that Starling Burgess drew up the concept first, but Occam's razor makes me doubt it." The Times Online web site credits the design to "Stanley Morrison, Victor Lardent and perhaps Starling Burgess". In the phototypesetting and digital typesetting periods many font designs have been published inspired by Times New Roman. Although the digital data of Monotype and Linotype releases of Times New Roman are copyrighted, and

10192-492: Was being cast, and so it did not become popular among other newspapers: "Times Roman achieved its popularity chiefly in general printing, not in newspaper work." He described it as particularly used in "book work, especially non-fiction" such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica . Hutt also commented that Times New Roman's relative condensation was less useful than might be expected for newspaper printing, since in

10296-431: Was common at the time, and many alternates were also offered for Gill Sans for use in Europe. A modified 4 3 ⁄ 4 point size of Times Roman was produced by Monotype for use in printing matter requiring a very small size of type. Listed as Times Newspaper Smalls, available as either Series 333 or 335, it was also referred to by the name Claritas. This is a variant designed for printing mathematical formulae, using

10400-509: Was done to produce a lighter effect in which capital letters do not stand out so much, and was particularly intended for German use , since in the German language capitals are far more common since they appear at the start of each noun. Series 827 modified some letters (notably the R ) to correspond to their appearance in other typefaces popular in French printing. This production of what are now called stylistic alternates to suit national tastes

10504-616: Was published in The Library in 1942. However, because of the war, many libraries on the European continent were not accessible anymore. In 1942 he translated Erasmus ' In Praise of Folly into English. During World War II he saw service in the Middle East. After the war, he worked for some eight years at HMSO , again under Meynell. In 1954 Carter was hired by Oxford University Press , where he worked for sixteen years. He

10608-513: Was released in 1958, with new characters constantly being added for over a decade afterwards (thus, in 1971, 8,000 characters were included, and new ones were being added at a rate of about 5 per week). The Times also used a sans-serif wood type for printing newbills which had no connection to Times New Roman. It was similar to Kabel Bold Condensed . Times New Roman's popularity rapidly expanded beyond its original niche, becoming popular in book printing and general publishing. Monotype promoted

10712-547: Was studying law, Carter became interested in typography and bought a printing press. His first work with type came in 1928 and 1929 as an apprentice at the Monotype Corporation . At this time he formed friendships with Jan van Krimpen , Stanley Morison , Francis Meynell , and Oliver and Herbert Simon (cousins of his school-friend, John Rothenstein). He became involved the Curwen Press , and after leaving

10816-525: Was usually used for this purpose. Because of the popularity of Times Roman at the time, Monotype chose to design a variant of Times Roman suited to mathematical composition, and recut many additional characters needed for mathematics, including special symbols as well as Greek and Fraktur alphabets, to accompany the system instead of designing it around the typeface that was being used, for which characters were already available. Matrices for some 700 characters were available as part of Times Roman Series 569 when it

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