I was just reading the beginnings of an essay I started, about getting a new bike for Christmas. I wasn’t happy with it, the essay, not the bike, and I realized part of it was the experience, the aesthetic, in short, the font. The developers of LibreOffice defaulted the font in Writer to Liberation Serif, an appalling choice.

Liberation Serif, the name, is lovely. It sounds free and easy, clean with a flourish. Escape the chains of stodgy ol’ Word, and live the good life, the Writer life. On the page, it’s more like my cluttered (understatement) carport, or desk, where I can’t even count the snack options from memory, and where at least one pack of mixed nuts (which I just had to dig for) is best before August, two years ago. I thought I had composted all of those…

To be fair, the writing wasn’t great either. I was trying to capture what it felt like as a kid to be visiting my dad with my brother, and have the police knock on the door Christmas Eve and take him away. We had only just met his new girlfriend, and neither she nor we knew what to do. Anyway, that’s what drafts are for. The font was the real problem.

Writer is similar to Word, it’s writing software. Its users use it to type documents, so a default font that appears jumbled onto the page, and then kicked about by chickens is a poor choice, but that’s programmers for you, at least the type of programmer that would code a free competitor to MS Office.

Don’t get wrong. I say that with some affection. I’ve worked with programmers for decades, and they’re a varied bunch of smart people that can type a fuck-ton faster than I can, but there is a quirk shared by many programmers. They have a baked in feeling of being right. It may not be as true now, as it was back in the day, before everyone started taking Computer Science, but for a time anyway, programmers called themselves “Engineers,” and thought they knew everything.

Clever programmers, who would set out to write complex, but boring software like LibreOffice, don’t often pause to think, maybe I should ask some writers what font they’d like to stare at all day. It’s the reason we get things like old Outlook starting to search our inboxes before we’ve finished typing, one of the most inconvenient things ever.

I mean seriously, I get it that inbox maintenance ain’t my thing, and 40K is a lot of emails, but that’s why I’m using the search function! Let me type the full query before you start spinning!

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I switched to Malgun Gothic for a change. It’s better, but the name confuses me. It’s essentially Calibri. What’s Gothic about Calibri?