Times New Roman is a
serif
In typography, a serif () is a small line or stroke regularly attached to the end of a larger stroke in a letter or symbol within a particular font or family of fonts. A typeface or "font family" making use of serifs is called a serif typeface ...
typeface
A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font.
There are list of type ...
. It was commissioned by the British newspaper ''
The Times
''The Times'' is a British daily national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its current name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its sister paper ''The Sunday Times'' (fou ...
'' in 1931 and conceived by
Stanley Morison
Stanley Arthur Morison (6 May 1889 – 11 October 1967) was a British typographer, printing executive and historian of printing. Largely self-educated, he promoted higher standards in printing and an awareness of the best printing and typefaces o ...
, the artistic adviser to the British branch of the printing equipment company
Monotype
Monotyping is a type of printmaking made by drawing or painting on a smooth, non-absorbent surface. The surface, or matrix (printing), matrix, was historically a copper etching plate, but in contemporary work it can vary from zinc or glass to ac ...
, in collaboration with
Victor Lardent
Victor Lardent (1905–1968) was a British advertising designer and draftsman at ''The Times'' in London. He created the typeface Times New Roman under the artistic direction of Stanley Morison in 1931, which is commonly used in Microsoft Word.
Ca ...
, a lettering artist in ''The Times's'' advertising department. It has become one of the most popular typefaces of all time and is installed on most
desktop computer
A desktop computer (often abbreviated desktop) is a personal computer designed for regular use at a single location on or near a desk due to its size and power requirements. The most common configuration has a case that houses the power supply ...
s.
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 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
Roman or Romans most often refers to:
*Rome, the capital city of Italy
*Ancient Rome, Roman civilization from 8th century BC to 5th century AD
*Roman people, the people of ancient Rome
*''Epistle to the Romans'', shortened to ''Romans'', a letter ...
style (sometimes also called
Antiqua), 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
, established_title = Founded
, established_date = 753 BC
, founder = King Romulus (legendary)
, image_map = Map of comune of Rome (metropolitan city of Capital Rome, region Lazio, Italy).svg
, map_caption ...
or to the
Romans
Roman or Romans most often refers to:
*Rome, the capital city of Italy
*Ancient Rome, Roman civilization from 8th century BC to 5th century AD
*Roman people, the people of ancient Rome
*''Epistle to the Romans'', shortened to ''Romans'', a letter ...
.
''The Times'' stayed with Times New Roman for 40 years, but new production techniques and the format change from
broadsheet
A broadsheet is the largest newspaper format and is characterized by long Vertical and horizontal, vertical pages, typically of . Other common newspaper formats include the smaller Berliner (format), Berliner and Tabloid (newspaper format), ta ...
to
tabloid in 2004 have caused it to switch typeface five times from 1972 to 2007. However, all the new fonts have been variants of the original New Roman typeface.
Design
Times New Roman has a robust
colour
Color (American English) or colour (British English) is the visual perceptual property deriving from the spectrum of light interacting with the photoreceptor cells of the eyes. Color categories and physical specifications of color are associ ...
on the page and influences of European
early modern and
Baroque
The Baroque (, ; ) is a style of architecture, music, dance, painting, sculpture, poetry, and other arts that flourished in Europe from the early 17th century until the 1750s. In the territories of the Spanish and Portuguese empires including t ...
printing.
As a typeface designed for newspaper printing, Times New Roman has a high
x-height
upright 2.0, alt=A diagram showing the line terms used in typography
In typography, the x-height, or corpus size, is the distance between the baseline and the mean line of lowercase letters in a typeface. Typically, this is the height of the let ...
, short
descender
In typography and handwriting, a descender is the portion of a letter that extends below the baseline of a font.
For example, in the letter ''y'', the descender is the "tail", or that portion of the diagonal line which lies below the ''v'' c ...
s to allow tight
linespacing
In typography, leading ( ) is the space between adjacent lines of type; the exact definition varies.
In hand typesetting, leading is the thin strips of lead (or aluminium) that were inserted between lines of type in the composing stick to incre ...
and a relatively condensed appearance.
![Times ancestors](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/31/Times_ancestors.png)
The roman style of Plantin was loosely based on a metal type created in the late sixteenth century by the French artisan
Robert Granjon
Robert Granjon (1513-November 16, 1589/March 1590) was a French type designer and printer. He worked in Paris, Lyon, Frankfurt, Antwerp, and Rome for various printers. He is best known for having introduced the typeface Civilité and for his ital ...
and preserved in the collection of the
Plantin-Moretus Museum
The Plantin-Moretus Museum ( nl, Plantin-Moretusmuseum) is a printing museum in Antwerp, Belgium which focuses on the work of the 16th-century printers Christophe Plantin and Jan Moretus. It is located in their former residence and printing establ ...
of
Antwerp
Antwerp (; nl, Antwerpen ; french: Anvers ; es, Amberes) is the largest city in Belgium by area at and the capital of Antwerp Province in the Flemish Region. With a population of 520,504, .
This style is sometimes categorised as part of 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
A ball terminal is a design feature of a typeface
A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations ...
detailing 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
Baskerville is a serif typeface designed in the 1750s by John Baskerville (1706–1775) in Birmingham, England, and cut into metal by punchcutter John Handy. Baskerville is classified as a Serif#Transitional, transitional typeface, intended as a ...
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
lantin
Juprelle (; wa, Djouprele) is a municipality of Wallonia located in the province of Liège, Belgium.
On 1 January 2006 Juprelle had a total resident population of 8,405. The total area is 35.36 km² which gives a population density
Pop ...
never achieved".
Other changes from Plantin include a straight-sided 'M' and 'W' with three upper terminals not Plantin's four, both choices that move away from the old-style model.
Italic and bold
![Times ancestors italic](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Times_ancestors_italic.png)
Morison described the companion
italic as also being influenced by the typefaces created by the
Didot family
Didot is the name of a family of French printers, punch-cutters and publishers. Through its achievements and advancements in printing, publishing and typography, the family has lent its name to typographic measurements developed by François-Amb ...
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 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 Didot may refer to:
* Didot family, family of French printers, punch-cutters and publishers that flourished mainly in the 18th century
* Didot (typeface)
Didot is a group of typefaces. The word/name Didot came from the famous French printing and ...
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."
![Times and bold](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/Times_and_bold.png)
Rather than creating a companion
boldface
In typography, emphasis is the strengthening of words in a text with a font in a different style from the rest of the text, to highlight them. It is the equivalent of prosody stress in speech.
Methods and use
The most common methods in W ...
with letterforms similar to 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 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.
Historical background
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 the nineteenth-century style remain a common part of the aesthetic of newspaper printing; for example in 2017 digital typeface designer
Tobias Frere-Jones
Tobias Frere-Jones (born Tobias Edgar Mallory Jones; August 28, 1970) is an American type designer who works in New York City. He operates the company Frere-Jones Type and teaches typeface design at the Yale School of Art MFA program.
Among his ty ...
wrote that he kept his Exchange family, designed for the ''
Wall Street Journal
''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...
'', 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
Miller & Richard was a type foundry based in Edinburgh that designed and manufactured metal type. It operated from 1809 to 1952.
The foundry was established by William Miller. He had been works manager of the foundry established by Alexander W ...
.
![Times prior newspaper faces](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/97/Times_prior_newspaper_faces.png)
By 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
The Legibility Group is a series of serif typefaces created by the American Mergenthaler Linotype Company and intended for use in newspapers on Linotype's hot metal typesetting system. They were developed in-house by Linotype's design team, led by ...
.
These kept to 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
George Allen Hutt (1901–1973) was a British journalist, editor, newspaper designer and Communist and trade union activist.
Life
Hutt came from a family of printers, while his mother Marion was a headmistress. He attended Kilburn Grammar School ...
, 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
Walter Valentine Tracy RDI (14 February 1914 – 28 April 1995) was an English type designer, typographer and writer.
Biography
Walter Tracy was born in Islington, London and attended Shoreditch Secondary school. At the age of fourteen he wa ...
, 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 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
Perpetua and Felicity ( la, Perpetua et Felicitas) were Christian martyrs of the 3rd century. Vibia Perpetua was a recently married, well-educated noblewoman, said to have been 22 years old at the time of her death, and mother of an infant son s ...
typefaces were considered for a basis, and the Legibility Group designs were also examined. (Perpetua, which Monotype had recently commissioned from sculptor
Eric Gill
Arthur Eric Rowton Gill, (22 February 1882 – 17 November 1940) was an English sculptor, letter cutter, typeface designer, and printmaker. Although the ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'' describes Gill as ″the greatest artist-cra ...
at Morison's urging, 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."
![Ludlow Times New Roman Type Specimen (14204771208)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/Ludlow_Times_New_Roman_Type_Specimen_%2814204771208%29.jpg)
Morison's biographer
Nicolas Barker
Nicolas John Barker (born 1932) is a British historian of printing and books. He was Head of Conservation at the British Library from 1976 to 1992 and is a former editor of ''The Book Collector''.
A bibliography of his work was published to m ...
has written that Morison's memos of the time wavered over a variety of options before it was ultimately concluded that Plantin formed 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 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
Christophe Plantin ( nl, Christoffel Plantijn; – 1 July 1589) was a French Renaissance humanist and book printer and publisher who resided and worked in Antwerp.
Life
Plantin was born in France, probably in Saint-Avertin, near the city of ...
, 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 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 a reason that sharper serifs looked better after
stereotyping
In social psychology, a stereotype is a generalized belief about a particular category of people. It is an expectation that people might have about every person of a particular group. The type of expectation can vary; it can be, for example ...
or printed on a
rotary press
A rotary printing press is a printing press in which the images to be printed are curved around a cylinder. Printing can be done on various substrates, including paper, cardboard, and plastic. Substrates can be sheet feed or unwound on a continuo ...
.
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
Daniel Berkeley Updike (February 14, 1860 – December 29, 1941) was an American printer and historian of typography. In 1880 he joined the publishers Houghton, Mifflin & Company, of Boston as an errand boy. He worked for the firm's Riverside ...
, a prominent American printing historian with whom he corresponded frequently. Morison's several accounts of his reasoning in designing 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 the final type, but not the details."
The design was adapted from Lardent's large drawings by the Monotype drawing office team in
Salfords
Salfords ) is a village in the borough of Reigate and Banstead in Surrey, England. It lies approximately south of Redhill on the A23 London to Brighton road. The village is within the civil parish of Salfords and Sidlow which covers a popu ...
,
Surrey
Surrey () is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in South East England, bordering Greater London to the south west. Surrey has a large rural area, and several significant urban areas which form part of the Greater London Built-up Area. ...
, 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 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
''The Times Literary Supplement'' (''TLS'') is a weekly literary review published in London by News UK, a subsidiary of News Corp.
History
The ''TLS'' first appeared in 1902 as a supplement to ''The Times'' but became a separate publication ...
'' which he held from 1945 to 1948.
Times New Roman remained Morison's only type design; he designed a type to be issued by the
Bauer Type Foundry
Bauer is a German surname meaning "peasant" or "farmer". For notable people sharing the surname, see Bauer (surname).
Bauer may also refer to:
Education and literature
* Bauer's Lexicon, a dictionary of Biblical Greek
* Bauer College of Bus ...
of Frankfurt but the project was abandoned due to the war. Morison told his friend
Ellic Howe
Ellic Paul Howe (20 September 1910 – 28 September 1991) was a British author who wrote extensively on occultism and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn as well as on typography and military history. During World War II he worked for Britain's ...
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 Brooke may refer to:
People
* Brooke (given name)
* Brooke (surname)
* Brooke baronets, families of baronets with the surname Brooke
Places
* Brooke, Norfolk, England
* Brooke, Rutland, England
* Brooke, Virginia, US
* Brooke's Point, Palawan ...
, Printer to Cambridge University, recorded in his diary a more informal discussion of 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
''Radio Times'' (currently styled as ''RadioTimes'') is a British weekly listings magazine devoted to television and radio programme schedules, with other features such as interviews, film reviews and lifestyle items. Founded in May 1923 by J ...
'', on which he had been invited to experiment. M said that 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.
Metal type versions
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 the family.
Titling
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.
Times Hever Titling
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 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
Hever Castle ( ) is located in the village of Hever, Kent, near Edenbridge, south-east of London, England. It began as a country house, built in the 13th century. From 1462 to 1539, it was the seat of the Boleyn (originally 'Bullen') family.
...
, 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.
Times Wide (1938, series 427)
A variant intended for book printing, avoiding 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
Text figures (also known as non-lining, lowercase, old style, ranging, hanging, medieval, billing, or antique figures or numerals) are numerals designed with varying heights in a fashion that resembles a typical line of running text, hence the ...
were also available.
Series 727 and 827
Monotype also produced Series 727, in which the heavier strokes of upper-case letters were made slightly thinner.
This 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
In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a typeface. Each font is a matched set of type, with a piece (a "sort") for each glyph. A typeface consists of a range of such fonts that shared an overall design.
In mode ...
to suit national tastes was common at the time, and many alternates were also offered for
Gill Sans
Gill Sans is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Eric Gill and released by the British branch of Monotype from 1928 onwards.
Gill Sans is based on Edward Johnston's 1916 "Underground Alphabet", the corporate font of London Underground. ...
for use in Europe.
Claritas
A modified 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.
Times 4-line Mathematics Series 569
This is a variant designed for printing mathematical formulae, using 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 a Greek nu.
The 4-line system involved casting characters for 10-point Times Roman on 6-point
bodies
Bodies may refer to:
* The plural of body
* ''Bodies'' (2004 TV series), BBC television programme
* Bodies (upcoming TV series), an upcoming British crime thriller limited series
* "Bodies" (''Law & Order''), 2003 episode of ''Law & Order''
* ...
. The top of the character would overhang the slug, forming a
kern
KERN (1180 AM) is a commercial radio station licensed to Wasco-Greenacres, California, and serving the Bakersfield metropolitan area. The station is owned by American General Media. The radio studios and offices are in the American General Me ...
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 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 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 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
In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif, gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than seri ...
wood type
In letterpress printing, wood type is movable type made out of wood. First used in China for printing body text, wood type became popular during the nineteenth century for making large display typefaces for printing posters, because it was lig ...
for printing newsbills which had no connection to Times New Roman. It was similar to
Kabel Bold Condensed.
Usage
![Colliers Times New Roman letter perfect](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Colliers_Times_New_Roman_letter_perfect.jpg)
Times New Roman's popularity rapidly expanded beyond its original niche, becoming popular in book printing and general publishing. Monotype promoted 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
Nonesuch Press was a private press founded in 1922 in London by Francis Meynell, his second wife Vera Mendel, and their mutual friend David Garnett,Miranda Knorr"The Nonesuch Press: A Product of Determination" An Exhibit of Rare Books at the Oka ...
and printed by R&R Clark in 1934. (Because 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 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
''Woman's Home Companion'' was an American monthly magazine, published from 1873 to 1957. It was highly successful, climbing to a circulation peak of more than four million during the 1930s and 1940s. The magazine, headquartered in Springfield, O ...
'' and then its sister publications such as ''
Collier's
''Collier's'' was an American general interest magazine founded in 1888 by Peter Fenelon Collier. It was launched as ''Collier's Once a Week'', then renamed in 1895 as ''Collier's Weekly: An Illustrated Journal'', shortened in 1905 to ''Collie ...
''.
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 a redesign, however noted that the design's compression and fine detail extending to the edge of the
matrices
Matrix most commonly refers to:
* ''The Matrix'' (franchise), an American media franchise
** ''The Matrix'', a 1999 science-fiction action film
** "The Matrix", a fictional setting, a virtual reality environment, within ''The Matrix'' (franchis ...
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 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
An encyclopedia (American English) or encyclopædia (British English) is a reference work or compendium providing summaries of knowledge either general or special to a particular field or discipline. Encyclopedias are divided into articles ...
''. Hutt also commented that Times New Roman's relative condensation was less useful than might be expected for newspaper printing, since in 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 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 the requirements of a good small type
utTimes Roman, which most people find the easiest to read of small text-types, runs counter to some of them...
orisonavoided 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, the
American Psychological Association
The American Psychological Association (APA) is the largest scientific and professional organization of psychologists in the United States, with over 133,000 members, including scientists, educators, clinicians, consultants, and students. It ha ...
suggests using Times New Roman in papers written in its
APA style
APA style (also known as APA format) is a writing style and format for academic documents such as scholarly journal articles and books. It is commonly used for citing sources within the field of behavioral and social sciences, including sociol ...
.
Linotype design (Times Roman)
![Times Roman vs Times New Roman](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e6/Times_Roman_vs_Times_New_Roman.png)
Monotype originally created Times New Roman for its typesetting machines, but its rival
Linotype rapidly began to offer its version of 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 the versions marketed by Linotype and Monotype when the master fonts were transferred from metal to
photo
A photograph (also known as a photo, image, or picture) is an image created by light falling on a photosensitive surface, usually photographic film or an electronic image sensor, such as a CCD or a CMOS chip. Most photographs are now created ...
and digital media. For example, Linotype has slanted
serif
In typography, a serif () is a small line or stroke regularly attached to the end of a larger stroke in a letter or symbol within a particular font or family of fonts. A typeface or "font family" making use of serifs is called a serif typeface ...
s 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 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 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
In typography, kerning is the process of adjusting the spacing between Character (symbol), characters in a Typeface#Proportion, proportional font, usually to achieve a visually pleasing result. Kerning adjusts the space between individual le ...
'f', one that extended into the space of surrounding letters.
This restriction was removed in the digital version.
Linotype licensed its version to
Xerox
Xerox Holdings Corporation (; also known simply as Xerox) is an American corporation that sells print and electronic document, digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut (ha ...
and then
Adobe
Adobe ( ; ) is a building material made from earth and organic materials. is Spanish for ''mudbrick''. In some English-speaking regions of Spanish heritage, such as the Southwestern United States, the term is used to refer to any kind of e ...
and
Apple
An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple fruit tree, trees are agriculture, cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, wh ...
, guaranteeing its importance in digital printing by making it one of the core fonts of the
PostScript
PostScript (PS) is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Doug Br ...
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 the trademark name ''Times Roman'' and received registration status in 1945.
Modern releases
Monotype variants
Monotype released at least eight digital typefaces that carry the name Times New Roman.
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 version of Windows' Times New Roman includes
small capitals
In typography, small caps (short for "small capitals") are grapheme, characters typeset with glyphs that resemble letter case, uppercase letters (capitals) but reduced in height and weight close to the surrounding letter case, lowercase letters ...
, text figures, and italic
swash capitals
A swash is a typography, typographical flourish, such as an exaggerated serif, terminal, tail, entry stroke, etc., on a glyph.
The use of swash characters dates back to at least the 16th century, as they can be seen in Ludovico Vicentino degli A ...
.
It omits automatic
ligature
Ligature may refer to:
* Ligature (medicine), a piece of suture used to shut off a blood vessel or other anatomical structure
** Ligature (orthodontic), used in dentistry
* Ligature (music), an element of musical notation used especially in the me ...
insertion, but enabling 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
Core fonts for the Web was a project started by Microsoft in 1996 to create a standard pack of fonts for the World Wide Web. It included the proprietary fonts Andalé Mono, Arial, Arial Black, Comic Sans MS, Courier New, Georgia, Impact, Times Ne ...
package.
When the system font Times New Roman was expanded to support
Arabic script
The Arabic script is the writing system used for Arabic and several other languages of Asia and Africa. It is the second-most widely used writing system in the world by number of countries using it or a script directly derived from it, and the ...
, it was complemented with the Arabic character set from
Simplified Arabic
Simplified Arabic (called Yakout since 1967) is a simplified Arabic font that allowed Arabic text to be composed using a Linotype machine. It was first announced in 1959 as ''Mrowa-Linotype Simplified Arabic''. The font was developed by Kamel Mrow ...
, a typeface that
Compugraphic Corporation
Compugraphic Corporation, commonly called cg, was an American producer of typesetting systems and phototypesetting equipment, based in Wilmington, Massachusetts, just a few miles from where it was founded. This company is distinct from Compugrap ...
had
plagiarized
Plagiarism is the fraudulent representation of another person's language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions as one's own original work.From the 1995 '' Random House Compact Unabridged Dictionary'': use or close imitation of the language and thought ...
from
Linotype and leased to
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...
.
Times New Roman with support for Arabic was first published in the Arabic version of
Windows 3.1x
Windows 3.1 is a major release of Microsoft Windows. It was released to manufacturing on April 6, 1992, as a successor to Windows 3.0.
Like its predecessors, the Windows 3.1 series ran as a shell on top of MS-DOS. Codenamed Janus, Windows 3. ...
.
Times New Roman OS
Also known as Times New Roman World, this is originally based on the version of Times New Roman bundled with
Windows Vista
Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...
. It includes fonts in
WGL character sets, Hebrew and Arabic characters. Similar to
Helvetica World, Arabic in italic fonts are in roman positions.
Others
Monotype further sells 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.
*Times New Roman Pro and Times New Roman Std are the basic releases, which include Regular, Medium, Semi Bold, and Bold weights with matching italics, along with Extra Bold and Condensed (in regular, italic and bold).
Times New Roman Pro and Std provide standard ligature for "fi".
*Times New Roman Seven is for smaller text and includes Regular and Bold with their italics.
*Times New Roman Small Text includes Regular, Italic, and Bold.
Linotype variants
Times
![Times vs Times New Roman](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/Times_vs_Times_New_Roman.png)
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".
Others
Like Monotype, Linotype released additional versions of Times for different text sizes. These include:
*Times Ten is a version specially designed for smaller text (12-point and below). It features wider characters and stronger hairlines.
In 2004 prominent typeface designer
Erik Spiekermann
Erik Spiekermann (born 30 May 1947 in Stadthagen, Lower Saxony) is a German typographer, designer and writer. He is an honorary professor at the University of the Arts Bremen and ArtCenter College of Design.
Biography
Spiekermann studied art his ...
said that he believed that it was the best Times New Roman digitisation then available.
*Times Eighteen, a headline version for point sizes of 18 and larger. The characters are subtly condensed and the hairlines are finer. The current version has no italics, but does have a lower case (whereas some Times titling fonts were capitals only).
*Times Europa Office, a 2006 adaptation of ''The Times's'' 1972 design Times Europa (see below). This is a complete family of designs intended for use on poor-quality paper. The updating, created by Akira Kobayashi, contains
tabular
Table may refer to:
* Table (furniture), a piece of furniture with a flat surface and one or more legs
* Table (landform), a flat area of land
* Table (information), a data arrangement with rows and columns
* Table (database), how the table data ...
numbers, mathematical signs, and
currency symbol
A currency symbol or currency sign is a graphic symbol used to denote a currency unit. Usually it is defined by the monetary authority, like the national central bank for the currency concerned.
In formatting, the symbol can use various format ...
s. Each character has the same advance width in all the fonts in the family so that changing from regular to bold or italic does not affect word wrap.
Later typefaces used by ''The Times''
![Balfour Declaration in the Times 9 November 1917](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5d/Balfour_Declaration_in_the_Times_9_November_1917.jpg)
''The Times'' newspaper has commissioned various successors to Times New Roman:
*Times Europa was designed by Walter Tracy in 1972 for ''The Times'', as a sturdier alternative to the Times font family, designed for the demands of faster printing presses and cheaper paper.
It has been released commercially by Adobe, among others, recently in an updating by Linotype as Times Europa Office (discussed above).
*Times Roman replaced Times Europa on 30 August 1982.
*Times Millennium was made in 1991, drawn by Gunnlaugur Briem on the instructions of Aurobind Patel, composing manager of News International.
*Times Classic first appeared in 2001.
Designed as an economical face by Dave Farey and Richard Dawson, it took advantage of the new PC-based publishing system at the newspaper; the new typeface included 120 letters per font.
*Times Modern was unveiled on 20 November 2006, as the successor of Times Classic.
Designed for improving legibility in smaller font sizes, it uses 45-degree angled bracket serifs. It was designed by Research Studios, led by designer
Neville Brody
Neville Brody, (born 23 April 1957) is an English graphic designer, typographer and art director. He is known for his work on ''The Face'' magazine (1981–1986), ''Arena'' magazine (1987–1990), and designing record covers for artists such a ...
with input from
Ben Preston
James Ben Preston (born 24 September 1963) is a British journalist. He is an executive editor of ''The Sunday Times'' and a former editor of the '' Radio Times''.
Early life
His father was Peter Preston, editor of ''The Guardian'' from 1975– ...
, deputy editor of ''The Times''.
(Other designs have been released called Times Modern; see below.) During the Times New Roman period ''The Times'' also sometimes used
Perpetua Titling.
William Starling Burgess
In 1994 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
William Starling Burgess (December 25, 1878 – March 19, 1947) was an American yacht designer, aviation pioneer, and naval architect. He was awarded the highest prize in aviation, the Collier Trophy in 1915, just two years after Orville Wright w ...
.
[
] This theory remains controversial.
[
] Parker and his friend
Gerald Giampa Gerald Giampa (March 4, 1950 - June 24, 2009) was a printer, typographer and author.
Biography
When Gerald Giampa was born on 4 March 1950, his parents lived in a tent in Duncan, British Columbia. His interest in printing books came from his grand ...
, 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 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
Asbestos () is a naturally occurring fibrous silicate mineral. There are six types, all of which are composed of long and thin fibrous crystals, each fibre being composed of many microscopic "fibrils" that can be released into the atmosphere b ...
contamination.
Giampa asked Parker to complete the type from the limited number of surviving letters, which was issued in June 2009 by
Font Bureau
The Font Bureau, Inc. or Font Bureau is a digital type foundry based in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. The foundry is one of the leading designers of typefaces, specializing in type designs for magazine and newspaper publishers.
History
...
under the name of 'Starling'.
Reception to the claims was sceptical, with dismissal from Morison's biographer Nicolas Barker and
Luc Devroye
Luc P. Devroye is a Belgian computer scientist and mathematician and a James McGill Professor in the School of Computer Science of McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Devroye specializes in the probabilistic analysis of algorithms, r ...
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 the claim had begun as a prank.
In 2010, writer 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 was based on Plantin...I won't rule out the possibility that Starling Burgess drew up the concept first, but
Occam's razor
Occam's razor, Ockham's razor, or Ocham's razor ( la, novacula Occami), also known as the principle of parsimony or the law of parsimony ( la, lex parsimoniae), is the problem-solving principle that "entities should not be multiplied beyond neces ...
makes me doubt it."
The Times Online web site credits the design to "Stanley Morrison, Victor Lardent and perhaps Starling Burgess".
Designs inspired by Times New Roman
![Pelham Infant](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8d/Pelham_Infant.jpg)
In the
phototypesetting
Phototypesetting is a method of setting type. It uses photography to make columns of type on a scroll of photographic paper.
It has been made obsolete by the popularity of the personal computer and desktop publishing (digital typesetting).
Th ...
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 the name ''Times'' is trademarked,
the ''design'' is in many countries
not copyrightable, notably in the United States, allowing alternative interpretations if they do not reuse digital data.
*Times Modern was a condensed and bold display variant published by, among others,
Elsner+Flake Elsner is a German surname. Notable people with the surname include:
*Branko Elsner (1929–2012), Slovenian footballer and manager
*David Elsner (born 1992), German ice hockey player
*Gisela Elsner (1937–1992), German writer
*Hannelore Elsner (1 ...
. It was withdrawn from sale due to trademark disputes with the ''Times'' newspaper, which owns its own unrelated design named 'Times Modern' (see above).
*CG Times is a variant of Times family made by
Compugraphic
Compugraphic Corporation, commonly called cg, was an American producer of typesetting systems and phototypesetting equipment, based in Wilmington, Massachusetts, just a few miles from where it was founded. This company is distinct from Compugraph ...
.
*Pelham is a version of Times Roman by DTP Types of Britain, which also designed an
infant version with single-storey 'a' and 'g'.
![Sample of IBM Magnetic Card Composer Output](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/56/Sample_of_IBM_Magnetic_Card_Composer_Output.png)
* In the mid-1960s, a derivative of Times New Roman known as 'Press Roman' was used as a font for the
IBM Composer
The IBM Selectric typewriter was a highly successful line of electric typewriters introduced by IBM on 31 July 1961.
Instead of the "basket" of individual typebars that swung up to strike the ribbon and page in a typical typewriter of the perio ...
.
This was an ultra-premium electric 'golfball'
typewriter
A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical machine for typing characters. Typically, a typewriter has an array of keys, and each one causes a different single character to be produced on paper by striking an inked ribbon selectivel ...
system, intended to be used for producing high-quality office documents or copy to be photographically enlarged for small-scale printing projects.
Unlike most typewriters, the Composer produced proportional type, rather than monospaced letters. Ultimately the system proved a niche product, as it competed with increasingly cheap phototypesetting, and then in the 1980s was largely displaced by word processors and general-purpose computers.
* Among many digital-period designs loosely inspired by Times,
Kris Sowersby
The kris, or ''keris'' in the Indonesian language, is an asymmetrical dagger with distinctive blade-patterning achieved through alternating laminations of iron and nickelous iron (''pamor''). Of Javanese origin, the kris is famous for its disti ...
's popular Tiempos family is a loose Times New Roman revival; it was created for a Spanish newspaper ('tiempo' is Spanish for 'time').
Free alternatives
![Times New Roman Liberation Serif comparison](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/63/Times_New_Roman_Liberation_Serif_comparison.png)
There are some
free software
Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...
fonts used as alternatives, including
metric-compatible
A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font.
There are thousands o ...
designs used for
font substitution
Font substitution is the process of using one typeface in place of another when the intended typeface either is not available or does not contain glyphs for the required characters.
Font substitution can be aided by:
* classifying fonts into gen ...
.
*
URW++
URW Type Foundry GmbH (formerly URW++ Design & Development GmbH) is a type foundry based in Hamburg, Germany. The foundry has its own library with more than 500 font families. The company specializes in customized corporate typefaces and the d ...
produced a version of Times New Roman called
Nimbus Roman
Nimbus Roman is a serif typeface created by URW Studio in 1982.
Nimbus Roman No. 9 L is a serif typeface created by URW Studio in 1987, and eventually released under the GPL and AFPL (as Type 1 font for Ghostscript) in 1996 and LPPL in ...
in 1982. Nimbus Roman No9 L, URW's
PostScript
PostScript (PS) is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Doug Br ...
variant, was released under the
GNU General Public License
The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the Four Freedoms (Free software), four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was th ...
in 1996, and is included with some
free
Free may refer to:
Concept
* Freedom, having the ability to do something, without having to obey anyone/anything
* Freethought, a position that beliefs should be formed only on the basis of logic, reason, and empiricism
* Emancipate, to procur ...
and
open source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...
software. Various adapted versions exist including
FreeSerif
GNU FreeFont (also known as Free UCS Outline Fonts) is a family of free OpenType, TrueType and WOFF vector fonts, implementing as much of the Universal Character Set (UCS) as possible, aside from the very large CJK Asian character set. The pr ...
,
TeX Gyre Termes and TeX Gyre Termes Math. Like Times New Roman, many additional styles of Nimbus Roman exist that are only sold commercially, including condensed and extra-bold styles. URW also developed Nimbus Roman No. 4, which is metrically compatible with the slightly different CG Times.
*
Linux Libertine
Linux Libertine is a digital typeface created by the Libertine Open Fonts Project, which aims to create free and open alternatives to proprietary typefaces such as Times New Roman. It is developed with the free font editor FontForge and is licen ...
developed in 2003 released under the
GNU General Public License
The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the Four Freedoms (Free software), four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was th ...
and the
SIL Open Font License
The SIL Open Font License (or OFL in short) is one of the major open font licenses, which allows embedding, or "bundling", of the font in commercially sold products.
OFL is a free and open source license.
It was created by SIL International ...
. Adopted for the redesign of the Wikipedia logo in 2010.
![Times and STIX](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Times_and_STIX.png)
* The
STIX Fonts project
The STIX Fonts project or Scientific and Technical Information Exchange (STIX), is a project sponsored by several leading scientific and technical publishers to provide, under royalty-free license, a comprehensive font set of mathematical symbols a ...
is a four-style set of open-source fonts. They were created for scientific publishing by the Scientific and Technical Information Exchange consortium of publishers, but are also very suitable for general use, including Greek and Cyrillic support.
The original version is installed by default on
Mac OS X
macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...
, and adapted as
XITS. In 2016, a completely redesigned version was released by Ross Mills and John Hudson of Tiro Typeworks. Unlike the previous version, it is an original design loosely inspired by a
smaller 10-point size of Times New Roman, with a higher
x-height
upright 2.0, alt=A diagram showing the line terms used in typography
In typography, the x-height, or corpus size, is the distance between the baseline and the mean line of lowercase letters in a typeface. Typically, this is the height of the let ...
than Monotype's Times digitisation.
*
Liberation Serif by
Steve Matteson
Steven R. Matteson (born 1965, Chicago, Illinois) is an American typeface designer whose work is included in several computer operating systems and embedded in game consoles, cell phones and other electronic devices. He is the designer of the Micr ...
is metrically equivalent to Times New Roman.
It was developed by
Ascender Corp. and published by
Red Hat
Red Hat, Inc. is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, with other offices worldwide.
Red Hat has become ass ...
in 2007 under the
GPL
The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general us ...
with the
font exception. Widths aside, it does not particularly resemble Times New Roman, being much squarer in shape with less fine detail and blunt ends rather than ball terminals.
Google's Tinos in the
Croscore fonts
The ChromeOS core fonts, also known as the Croscore fonts, are a collection of three TrueType font families: Arimo (sans-serif), Tinos (serif) and Cousine (monospace). These fonts are metrically compatible with Monotype Corporation’s Arial ...
package is a derivative of Liberation Serif.
*
Bitstream Cyberbit
''Bitstream Cyberbit'' is a commercial serif Unicode font designed by Bitstream Inc. It is freeware for non-commercial uses. It was one of the first widely available fonts to support a large portion of the Unicode repertoire.
Cyberbit was deve ...
is a roman-only font released by
Bitstream
A bitstream (or bit stream), also known as binary sequence, is a sequence of bits.
A bytestream is a sequence of bytes. Typically, each byte is an 8-bit quantity, and so the term octet stream is sometimes used interchangeably. An octet may ...
with an expanded character range intended to cover a large proportion of
Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...
for scholarly use, with European alphabets based on Times New Roman.
Bitstream no longer offers the font, but it remains downloadable from the
University of Frankfurt.
*
Doulos SIL
Doulos SIL (Ancient Greek for "slave") is a serif typeface developed by SIL International, very similar to Times or Times New Roman. Unlike Times New Roman, Doulos only has a single face, Regular. The goal of its design according to the SIL In ...
is a serif typeface developed by
SIL International
SIL International (formerly known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics) is an evangelical Christian non-profit organization whose main purpose is to study, develop and document languages, especially those that are lesser-known, in order to ex ...
.
*In September 2016, the companies of NPO RusBITech JSC (developer of the Astra Linux operating systems) and NPP ParaType LLC (developer of nationwide fonts) presented publicly available fonts: PT Astra Sans and
PT Astra Serif, metrically compatible (analogs) with Times New Roman.
Notes
References
Sources
Cited literature
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
External links
* Times Modern, by Dan Rhatigan
Part 1an
Part 2Times New Roman family(different sizes, in hot metal type)
Times New Roman font family - Typography , Microsoft Docs* Fonts in Use
Times New RomanTimes
{{Authority control
Monotype typefaces
Windows XP typefaces
Transitional serif typefaces
Corporate typefaces
Typefaces with optical sizes
Newspaper and magazine typefaces
Typefaces with infant variants
Typefaces and fonts introduced in 1932
The Times
Old style serif typefaces
Typefaces with text figures
Latin-script typefaces
IPA typefaces
Arabic typefaces