The international market for fonts

 There was a time when printing was a local business, and so fonts had local markets. And the buyers were printers, so even if the ultimate customers had artistic preferences (e.g. newspapers liked to look different from books), the names of the fonts were not a big issue.

But Microsoft's announcements of new fonts for Word has opened up a window (so to speak) on some considerations that I hadn't thought about.

CNBC has the story, including an interview with Lucas de Groot, the designer of the previous default font, Calibri:

Microsoft is rolling out a new default font to 1.2 billion Office users after 14 years — and the designer of the old one is surprised  by Jordan Novet

"Coming up with the name was not easy. For both of his fonts, Microsoft wanted names that started with the letter C.

"As de Groot put it in an email, “I had proposed Clas, a Scandinavian first name and associated with ‘class,’ but then the Greek advisor said it meant ‘to fart’ in Greek. Then I proposed Curva or Curvae, which I still like, but then the Cyrillic advisor said it meant ‘prostitute’ in Russian, it is indeed used as a very common curse word.” Microsoft legal workers also checked each possible name to see if it had already been trademarked.

"The company came up with the name “Calibri,” and when de Groot first heard it, he found it odd. It was similar to Colibri, a genus of hummingbirds. But then Microsoft employees said that it related to calibrating the rasterizer in the company’s ClearType font rendering system."

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I realize that I like fonts with serifs, which for example distinguish my name from the acronym for Artificial Intelligence: Al and AI.

In a sans-serif font, those are Al and AI.

Apparently sans-serif fonts were easier to read on low resolution computer screens.