
UK funder rejects 4% of applicants over font transgressions - dluan
http://www.nature.com/news/grant-application-rejected-over-choice-of-font-1.18686?WT.mc_id=GPL_NatureNews
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informatimago
1- I fail to see how that optimize taxpayer's money usage.

2- I long for the time when you'd just send an ASCII file and they'd use
whatever fucking font they wanted to print it out.

The only objective thing they're selecting by having such rules, is whether
the "researcher" asking for a grant will be docile and cooperative enough to,
eg. participate in scams such as IPCC or vaccines, if not worse.

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Asbostos
How many seconds of taxpayer money would be wasted just changing the font
themselves? They might need to ask for a Word document instead of a pdf but so
what? I agree this sounds petty considering how much work apparently goes into
such an application. If they're trying to screen out spammers, the way
employers do with CVs, then maybe this is a practical test though.

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cowsandmilk
This is all about the page limits on grants and making it so everyone has the
same room to describe their projects.

It is petty to reject over a font, especially when it seems they had a vague
description of requirements, but changing the font has nothing to do with why
the grant applications were rejected; it was that if the font was changed, the
grant would be over the page limit allowed.

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iamben
Sort of reminds me of the bands that wouldn't play a venue if the crazy rider
demands weren't adhered to. So the logic goes - if the venue haven't put the
effort in to source the bizarre requests on the rider, they probably haven't
met all the requirements for sound, electrics, stage weight etc. And thus the
show will be terrible or dangerous.

If you can't follow the initial instructions regarding the font, what chances
do you have further down the line?

(That said, passing on Calibri before explicitly banning it seems a tad
harsh.)

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Blackthorn
If anyone is wondering about some specifics and doesn't already know the
story, this was a (now well-known) trick by Van Halen. Their rider included a
provision where backstage needed to have a bowl of M&Ms with all the brown
ones removed. It was explicitly done as a safety measure. More details:
[http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/vanhalen.asp](http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/vanhalen.asp)

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sauronlord
I regularly discard resumes and applications because of font and typographic
transgressions. Why?

Because I have a hard time reading the resume with a script font or some other
equally hard to read font.

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dingo_bat
Calibri is not hard to read. Your point is correct but it does not apply here.

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johan_larson
Comic Sans means no money!

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rcurry
That's why I switched from Comic Sans to Ariana Grande.

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gaius
Preferred font of the Huffington Post.

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rcurry
Well played sir, well played indeed.

