On Jan 4, 2013, at 8:41 PM, Matthew Flaschen mflaschen@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 01/04/2013 02:37 PM, Quim Gil wrote:
There is a collection of good reasons objecting to this decision at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Foundation_Design/Typography#A...
- can someone answer, please?
I will be having a presentation in 4 weeks at FOSDEM and I want to take our design guidelines as inspiration for that slide deck. I don't know what fonts will be used but I can assure you Arial or any proprietary font won't be there. Any suggestions? We have the community driven fonts in Linux desktops spiced up by the work done by Canonical, Google and even Adobe recently.
I do agree it's important that Wikimedia sites to render well in free fonts. However, it's important to note that Liberation Sans (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts), a completely free font, is metrically compatible with Arial, and often on GNU/Linux the name Arial automatically uses Liberation Sans.
However, if we go with Arial, it would be worth specifying that Arial should be immediately followed by Liberation Sans (and perhaps one or two other free fonts) for systems without such a mapping.
Matt Flaschen
Why not the other way around?
font-family: "Liberation Sans", Arial;
-- Krinkle