Times New Roman

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Times New Roman
Typeface Times New Roman
Category Serif
Classifications Transitional
PANOSE: 2263545234
Designer(s) Stanley Morison
Starling Burgess
Victor Lardent
Commissioned by The Times
Foundry Monotype
Date released 1931
Size and spacing comparisons of the Georgia and Times New Roman typefaces.
Size and spacing comparisons of the Georgia and Times New Roman typefaces.

Times New Roman is a serif typeface commissioned by The Times (London) newspaper in 1931 and designed by Stanley Morison together with Starling Burgess and Victor Lardent. It was commissioned to address the problems of high-speed printing on low quality newsprint. It was first issued by the Monotype Corporation in 1932. Although no longer used by The Times, it is still widely used for book typography.

Because of its ubiquitous nature, Times New Roman has been influential in the subsequent development of a number of serif typefaces both before and after the start of the digital-font era. One notable example is Georgia, shown at right, which has very similar stroke shapes to Times New Roman but wider serifs.

A version of Times New Roman was produced by Monotype for Microsoft, and distributed with every copy of Microsoft Windows since version 3.1. As with Times on the Apple Macintosh, it is used as the default font in many applications, especially web browsers and word processors. Microsoft has however replaced Times New Roman with Calibri, a sans-serif font, as the default font in Microsoft Office 2007. [1]

Times New Roman is Microsoft's name for the TrueType version of Times New Roman PS, a narrower variant of Monotype's classic Times New Roman typeface. The PS version was introduced to match the metrics of Times Roman (a PostScript core font by Linotype). It has the lighter capitals which were originally developed for printing German (where all nouns begin with a capital letter).

In 2004, the U.S. State Department announced that as of February 1, 2004, all U.S. diplomatic documents would use 14 point Times New Roman instead of the previous 12 point Courier New.

Contents

[edit] Times Roman

Times Roman is a body text, serif typeface. It is Linotype's licensed version of Monotype's Times New Roman typeface.

The differences between Times Roman and Times New Roman PS are mostly a trademark issue. Although there are subtle stylistic differences (for example, Linotype has slanted serifs on the capital S, Monotype's are vertical), most are invisible in body text at normal reading distances. (Vivid differences between the two versions do occur in the lowercase z in the italic weight and in the percent sign in all weights.) Although there was a time when Times New Roman had different widths than Times Roman, when Microsoft licensed Times New Roman for Windows, they asked Monotype to match the Adobe/Linotype widths from the PostScript font; as such, the most common versions seen today have identical widths in common characters.

Microsoft Windows computers feature Monotype's Times New Roman PS while Mac computers have Linotype's Times Roman (simply named ‘Times’). Computers running Open Source operating systems generally have URW's Nimbus Roman No9 L, which is URW's PostScript version of Times Roman, released under the GNU General Public License.

[edit] References

  1. ^ The end of an era for Times New Roman? - Andrew Whitacre, Fadtastic.net, accessed May 27, 2006

[edit] See also

[edit] External links