Reading Dennis Baron’s A Better Pencil, I thought this was accurate and funny:
It’s not just students and teachers who are more aware of formatting these days. Typography has become a cultural phenomenon, and computer fonts are the new wine. Although cuneiform eventually developed more than six hundred symbols, it’s not clear that the first clay writers discussed the merits of fonts. Typists probably didn’t, either. Until recently font was the kind of obscure word that might appear on the SAT or the New York Times crossword puzzle. But today it’s not unusual to come upon knots of people heatedly debating the qualities not of a fine wine, but of a bold New Century Schoolbook, a peppy but unpretentious Futura, a subtly scalable, slightly sophisticated Palatino, or an art-deco Papyrus.