Calibri (the font) not Colibri (the moderator) - he can live; however Calibri. Must. DIE!!!
I’ve changed it so that it’s not the default in Outlook, xl, & Word but that’s only for documents that I create. I can’t find how to replace it as a system default. When I extract a spreadsheet from our system, it opens in that God-forsaken font. Despite having a spreadsheet in Arial, when I paste a url in (that’s not in shitfont on the website) it shows up that way in my spreadsheet. It’s even the default in Wordpad, which comes with windows & doesn’t need office to use. There must be some way to change it from being the Windows default but my Googlefu isn’t finding any.
So how do I blast all vestiges of this incredibly-awful-to-read font from my PC?
It was designed specifically for Microsoft as one of its “ClearType” fonts, which are fonts designed to render properly on LCD screens. When Microsoft saw that LCD was overtaking CRT as the primary kind of display they were concerned that old fonts like Times New Roman or Arial would not look right on modern displays. Hence Calibri, which has “subtly rounded stems” and a “true italic” form influenced by handwriting.
Basically, as screens got better and resolutions got higher, older fonts looked clunky when zoomed in. ClearType fonts were the reaction. Microsoft really liked Calibri and released it with Windows Vista and made it the default font in Office 2007.
Other ClearType fonts are: Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantia and Corbel. (They all start with “C” for “ClearType”.)
Calibri is so ubiquitous that Google felt compelled to release their own freely-licensed font called “Carlito”, which is part of the ChromeOS and can replace Calibri in a document without disrupting layout since each character has the same metrics as the corresponding Calibri character.
The Panama Papers Case was a scandal in Pakistan where a document supposedly from 2006 was found to be a forgery because it used Calibri font which wasn’t publicly available until a year later:
If you’re really serious about killing Calibri, head to the registry and replace it. The key on Windows 10 is HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts, or at least that is the key on my machine. The values for that key are basically a map of fonts to TrueType files. If you want to kill Calibri, make the Calibri values point to TrueType files for other fonts you like, such as Tahoma. Your programs will think they are using Calibri, but they will render a different font on your machine only.
It is also worth noting that the font for the Windows 10 operating system itself is not Calibri, but Segoe-UI. So when you see Calibri in MS Office, that’s in all likelihood an MS Office setting. You say that you already changed the setting, and that other people’s documents open up with Calibri by default.
I’m afraid you are out of luck there, because these other people are saving their documents with the Calibri font. Unlike text files of old, MS Office documents specify the font in the file itself, so if someone else creates a document in Calibri font, it will open up in Calibri font for you. You can get around this by replacing Calibri in the registry as described above, just realize that you are only changing things for your own computer.
For this one try pasting without formatting (right click, paste without formatting) or changing the default font in your web browser settings. You may not realize this but often times copying and pasting copies the font, size, color, images, and a bunch of other stuff you may not necessarily want.
A lovely, informative post Atamasama. I can understand why a simple slanted italic looks bad on a monitor (using a grid to form diagonal lines), but don’t know how a true italic is going improve that, since the lines are still diagonal—and they have finicky little serifs.
I guess I’ll take a closer look at Calibri Italic on my screens sometime.
Be sure to check the button to make your new choice default for new documents. Otherwise it will only do it for your current document.
I hate calibri, too, so I made a shortcut to the normal.dotm template and pinned it to the documents menu in Word. If Word crashes and I lose my settings, it’s easy to open it up and restore things how I like them.
I typed and submitted my PhD thesis in Calibri. It was only a semi-conscious choice; I never bothered to change the font to anything else (which probably indicates that I couldn’t have found it so terrible), but I did have the awareness that I found it superior to other fonts, such as Arial or TNR (probably mostly because of their overuse, though). My supervisor didn’t complain either.
FWIW, this study concluded that among the different fonts used on test subjects, Calibri was perceived as the most professional and trustworthy.
It should be mentioned that the three fonts compared in that study were:
Calibri
Comic Sans
and… Gigi.
So, adjudging Calibri the most professional is not a meaningful accolade.
(I’m going only by the summary section that I could access without registration. And FWIW, I’m a graphic designer who likes Calibri just fine. I’ve used it on several project where I wanted non-professionals to be able to create supporting materials that would coordinate with my designs.)
