Ryan Kaldari, 16/02/2014 06:54:
Now that I've blamed everyone except for myself, I would like to suggest that we stop pointing fingers and get down to brass tacks.
Brad's email was a bit caustic but IMHO it wasn't pointing fingers, unlike yours (though you helpfully pointed fingers towards everyone). ;-)
My question for both the designers and the free font advocates is: Are there any free fonts that are...
- widely installed (at least on Linux systems)
- easily readable and not distractingly ugly
- would not be mapped to by the existing stack anyway (i.e. are not
simply clones or substitutes for popular commercial fonts)
I'm sorry but this question to "the free font advocates" does not make sense and I refuse to accept it, for two reasons: 1) is not a given or an immutable law of physics, it's the designers' job to assess: if you really care for a specific font you serve it; if you don't want to serve fonts, then design must adapt to availability and not the opposite; 2) is again the designers' job, I have no idea how one assesses "easily readable"* and I'd like us to banish personal opinions including adjectives like "strange" or "ugly" from any and all design decision;** moreover, if feedback had ever been desired on font choices, we would have a document explaining what this mythical "style desired by the designers" actually is, other than the superlunar ideal no human MediaWiki commentator can sense and comment.
So again, I'm waiting for documentation. Whoever refrains from publishing documentation, research, design documents etc. as soon as they are produced prevents iterations and feedback from happening and hence takes full personal responsibility of whatever outcome of the process, begging to be personally blamed.
Nemo
(*) In my very biased and personal experience of a Latin alphabet languages reader, "readable" equals "serif" so that I can tell I from l etc., and DejaVu serif is the most beautiful font ever because it covers so many characters. (**) I'm really hearing them too often. They are suppressors of discussion/rational discourse and polarise discussions unnecessarily. Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:IDONTLIKEIT.