[mark-r]

Times New Roman was designed to squeeze as much text on a page as possible, probably to make more room for ads.

Makes me wonder why it's not more popular today.

[exikyut]

Clarification: Times New Roman was designed for the London Times newspaper in 1929.

Silly me, I... heh, the first time I ever saw TnR was in relation to MS Word. And so I read this sentence thinking first about screen resolution, then "but why would you print ads in your documents"...