Technically, since Liberation Sans and Arial are default options on some platforms, just indicating the "sans-serif" generic family may be even better than specifying a list of default fonts such as "Helvetica, Arial Liberation Sans, Sans-Serif" (more about this herehttp://css-tricks.com/sans-serif/ ).
From the design perspective, it is good to have visual consistency across
platforms and languages (especially when content in different scripts may appear together). No font family I know of will meet both:
- Platform availability is not a big issue IMHO, webfonts can be used to deliver 92% of users would be able to use the selected font (according to this http://caniuse.com/fontface) and the rest of users will fallback to their system default for "sans-serif". Using webfonts has some extra cost but I am assuming that we are getting a benefit in terms of readability in the chosen font compared to the default system one that makes it worth using it. - Language availability is a bigger problem. Which even with webfonts cannot be always solved due to lack of distributable fonts. The Noto font family http://code.google.com/p/noto/ created by Google has the goal of providing visual harmonization (e.g., compatible heights and stroke thicknesses) across multiple languages which makes it a good candidate in terms of cross-language consistency. The list of supported scripts http://code.google.com/p/noto/wiki/FontList is large compared to others (e.g., see Adobe Source Pro roadmaphttps://github.com/adobe/source-sans-pro/blob/master/Roadmap.txt) but not complete yet.
Pau
On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 10:17 PM, Matthew Flaschen mflaschen@wikimedia.orgwrote:
On 01/08/2013 04:11 PM, Quim Gil wrote:
Note than "it's free and open sourced" is an important reason when we are "dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content".
I agree. Being "viewable or playable by free software tools" is an important part of our value statement. However, in this case there's really no trade-off, since Arial-only users lose nothing.
It's Liberation Sans. We're not talking about a zero-sum choice, just about the order.
Is there a reason not to default to Liberation Sans and have Arial as secondary choice?
As I said, I'm fine with that, and I explained why I don't think it will cause problems in any of the scenarios we're considering (computer without Liberation Sans, computer without CSS, computer with both Liberation and Arial).
Matt Flaschen
Design mailing list Design@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design