A tiny tale of government vibes, font panic, and the funniest possible accusation: that Calibri is “woke.” Spoiler: Calibri is not woke. Calibri is a Microsoft font. Corporate default energy, in its Sunday best.
Let’s get something straight and stylish: a font is not just a look. A font is software. Software comes with a license. That license decides whether you can share it with your community, bundle it with a template, install it on public machines, put it in an app, archive it with a document, or modify it for better readability and language support.
Proprietary fonts usually come with rules written by whoever owns them. You can use them in certain situations, sure, but sharing them widely and redistributing them freely is often not the point. The point is control, distribution limits, and dependency. That is the opposite of liberation. That is a gate with a price tag.
So when an institution standardizes on proprietary fonts, it quietly standardizes on a vendor relationship, too. The result is predictable: people without the right software get locked out, accessibility fixes become permission-based, and the public gets told to comply with a toolchain they do not control.
Switching from Calibri to Times New Roman is not a jailbreak. It is a vibe shift, not a liberation story. It is still a mainstream default that rides along with major commercial ecosystems. If the goal is compatibility, you can achieve that without turning fonts into a culture war mascot. If the goal is justice, you need more than a swap. You need the right to share, adapt, and redistribute.
People argue about “serious” versus “modern” typography like it is a moral referendum. Meanwhile, actual accessibility work is about readability, consistency, and making documents usable for everyone, including people with limited resources. That is not ideology. That is basic respect.
Now we arrive at the main character. Carlito is a metric-compatible replacement for Calibri. Translation: it is built so your documents do not explode when you open them outside the Microsoft bubble. Layout stays stable. Lines wrap the same. The text sits where it should. Compatibility, but with breathing room.
Here is the real twist: Carlito is released under the SIL Open Font License. That means you can use it, share it, bundle it with software, and even modify it to serve real human needs, like supporting more languages or improving accessibility. That is what freedom looks like when it is practical instead of performative.
If you want “woke” as in “people can actually participate,” you want a license that empowers the public. Woke requires freedom. Freedom requires permission to share. The font is just the most visible piece of the puzzle.
Real justice is not a slogan. It is infrastructure. It is whether a student can open a document without buying a suite. It is whether a community can translate materials into their language without begging a vendor. It is whether accessibility improvements can be shared instead of buried. It is whether public institutions can publish templates that the public can actually use.
Software Freedom is the backbone of that. When the tools of communication are locked down, the ability to learn, organize, and participate becomes conditional. When the tools are free, communities can build on top of them, improve them, and distribute them like a public good.
So sure, we can laugh at the “woke font” discourse, because it is ridiculous. But the underlying issue is serious. Fonts are software. Licenses are power. If you want justice, you want power distributed.
That is Carlito’s Way: keep compatibility, ditch gatekeeping, and make access mean access.