Times New Roman is one of the most popular and influential typefaces, found in the great majority of printed material -newspapers, books, magazines-, and set as default in many word processors such as Microsoft Word until its 2007 release. As a font with serifs (short lines added to the ends of the main strokes that make up a letter) its target medium is paper, so it is not as widely selected to display text on screen, where sans-serif alphabets are considered more readable.
More than 70 years old, Times New Roman was designed in 1932 by Stanley Morison and Victor Lardent for The Times, and acquired its name after replacing the old typeface of the London newspaper, which was called Times Old Roman. Nonetheless, because the daily issues were published with the help of both Monotype and Linotype equipment, the rights to the successful font have been legally distributed to result in the former foundry using the name Times New Roman, whereas the latter employs Times Roman. Although these two versions barely differ from each other visually, many variants of the face have been developed by diverse designers under different licenses, including Nimbus Roman, Times Modern, Times Ten, CG Times, etc.
Despite its ubiquity in the Western world, Times New Roman is not a large Unicode font, and it does not cover Far East characters such as Japanese or Chinese.
References:
- Times Roman (January 15, 2010). In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved January 15, 2010.
- Which font and line length is most readable on the screen? (June 17, 2004). In DSV – the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University and KTH, by Jacob Palme. Retrieved January 15, 2010.
- Times (New) Roman and its part in the Development of Scalable Font Technology (May 5, 1994). In TrueType Typography, by Charles Bigelow. Retrieved January 15, 2010.
- TYPOlis – Times New Roman (2010). In TYPOlis. Retrieved January 15, 2010.
- Font Styles: Times New Roman 12 Pt (August 07, 2006). In Associated Content, by KC Morgan. Retrieved January 17, 2010.
- A Sign of the Times (New Roman): Exploring the World of Fonts (VOL030) (August 29, 2009). In Productive U Podcast. Retrieved January 17, 2010.
- How to develop multi-lingual HTML page (2010). In Cyrillic (Russian): instructions for Windows and Internet, by Paul Gorodyansky. Retrieved January 19, 2010.
