You would think that the Washington Post could do better than this

James Montalbano

I'm seeing these hacks more and more these days.

James Puckett

It could be worse. The New York Times often omits diacritical marks so Vietnamese becomes gibberish.

Craig Eliason

Diacritics die in darkness

Kent Lew

When I was working on Haffner for TIME back in 2015, I purposely set a meeting with the chief of copyediting to discuss details of their editorial style with her — e.g., use of quotes & dashes, capitalization, citation, emphasis, etc., — including their stance on diacritics. 

I was told that their house style was not to use diacritics except for established loan words and common conventions, and even then only western European. 

I tried to have a discussion about the growing globalization of news media & communications, but there wasn’t any appetite for reconsidering. So the brief only covered Latin 1.

Sure enough, in print they still do not use diacritics for names such as Erdoğan. But in their digital products, apparently different editorial standards have emerged. And so I see things like this in my Apple News feed 😕:

I used to send occasional screenshots to my contacts in the art dept. But TIME never came back to me to commission an expansion, and I never pushed for it.

John Butler

Both Libre Bodoni and Bodoni Moda contain ō glyphs. WaPo should be able to specify them as fallback fonts after Postoni in their CSS.

John Savard

Kent Lew said:

When I was working on Haffner for TIME back in 2015,

Everyone else, seeing this sort of thing in TIME or the Washington Post or wherever, would just think it is ugly and incompetent. As the designer of the typeface TIME uses, no doubt you die a little bit inside each time you see this.

I can only extend my sincere sympathies.

Sadly, though, if people did decide this issue was intolerable, given the extra cost of adding so many characters to a font, it might just end up with publications just using a few free fonts with wide coverage - leading to less business for smaller typeface designers.

Kent Lew

The cost of adding characters to the fonts would not be exorbitant. Especially not compared to the investment in one’s brand, which distinctive fonts contribute a great deal to.

I doubt it is ultimately a question of money. These things are more a combination of bureaucracy, inertia, and/or disregard.

Jasper de Waard

You could argue that such a typographic faux pas reflects poorly on the qualities of the type designer, and therefore offer an extended character set as the only option to the client. Not sure how that meeting would go though...

John Savard

I have been thinking some more about this issue.

Is it possible to simultaneously hold, without contradicting oneself, the following two propositions as beliefs:

• The mishandling of accented words shown in the given examples is ugly and completely unacceptable;
• The decision on the part of the management at TIME Magazine not to commission a large number of additional characters for the typeface they commissioned for their use was entirely reasonable.

I think it is possible to do so. Because a right course of action without getting more characters for Haffler, or switching to another typeface, does exist for them. It consists of the following two actions:

1. Find a typeface, somewhat stylistically similar to Haffler, which has the extended language support required;
2. Instead of using it as a fallback font, when a word contains accented letters not supported in Haffler, display the entire word in that other typeface.

So a little more care in preparing copy, involving a bit of proofreading, is what's needed here. That's easily achievable, I would have thought, without spending a bunch of money. (Of course, the continuing cost of taking more care in preparing online content may well quickly add up to more than an extended character set for Haffler would cost.)

Nick Shinn

With its paucity of diacritics, the English language is put to shame by most others that use the Latin script—although we could incorporate the long s to make things more interesting. Why, the Waſhington Poſt could even go to town with a couple of charming old ligatures!

Yves Michel

This reminds me of a Benny Hill sketch about a girl named ſuſan

John Savard

Nick Shinn said:

With its paucity of diacritics, the English language is put to shame by most others that use the Latin script—although we could incorporate the long s to make things more interesting. Why, the Waſhington Poſt could even go to town with a couple of charming old ligatures!

Although I don't think that the long s really does anything for English, I do remember people complaining that (an older version of) the spelling of German did not really make sense with Roman (antiqua) typefaces, and only worked properly with Fraktur. I had posted that the issue wasn't really with Roman typefaces as such, and they could work as well with that form of German orthography as Fraktur faces, if, like Fraktur, they also incorporated the long s.