This brings up another issue: why does it seem laymen often use the term “type font” when you’ll never hear it among typographers and type designers?

So readers don’t confuse it with a baptismal font, used in a different kind of printing technology.

Another frequent piece of dumbass journalism is the use of “typeface” as a generic noun, as in “his love of typeface began at an early age”.

Maybe because they can’t separate the action from what is being acted upon? Ergo, I am typing with this font. Ah a stretch. Oh well.

Is anyone else confused about that date? I seem to remember TNR on my good ol’ 386, which was long before 1998... Unless of course there were certain distinctive characters used in the report that were not released until 1998.

- Lex

Windows 3.1 shipped in 1992 with TNR, but the laserwriter included Times outlines in 1985, and the font was of course popular in daisywheel and golf-ball impact printers and typewriters before that.

Actually, the use of “type font” may make sense here, to distinguish “font”, as physical or digital instance, from “type face”, which is a design capable of being expressed in various media by various hands. The idea being wrestled with, is that a particular font is a dateable iteration of a typeface design.

The problem is that in popular usage, “font” has come to mean the same as “typeface”, losing the distinction between the two. So while we may think “type” is a redundant prefix to “font”, that’s not so for the writer here, who may be attempting to re-establish the distinction.