Ryan, what about the argument that the font system will automatically do a replacement for
Helvetia neue, rather than going to the next font in the list, effectively putting the
choice in some Linux developers hands rather that ours?
Sent while mobile
On Dec 20, 2013, at 5:51 PM, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
The main reason I suggested using Linux Libertine as the 'preferred' header font
instead of DejuVu Serif is that DejaVu Serif doesn't at all resemble Georgia (the
proprietary font the designers wanted). It's almost a slab-serif font, which is very
different from the book/antique serifs of fonts like Georgia and Times. The designers
wanted a classic, "encyclopedic" looking font for the headers. DejaVu Serif is a
workhorse font, not a presentation/display font. It's appeal lies in its support for
thousands of Unicode characters, definitely not in its design (which is frankly pretty
awful). On pretty much any Linux system, specifying DejaVu Serif in the CSS is going to be
redundant anyway, since most of the popular Linux installs fall back to DejaVu Serif as
the default 'serif' font anyway. Thus any characters that can't get rendered
in the preferred fonts will get rendered in DejaVu anyway.
When choosing the order of fonts in a CSS stack, you always put the prettiest ones first,
and the most widely installed ones last. In the current case, we're doing it
backwards.
I'm also open to using 'Nimbus Roman No9 L', which is more widely installed
than Linux Libertine, but a lot nicer to look at than DejaVu Serif. It's basically a
Times Roman replacement. Another option would be Liberation Serif, which is pretty ugly,
but still nicer than DejaVu Serif.
My preferred font-stack for the headers would be:
font-family: "Linux Libertine", Georgia, "Nimbus Roman No9 L", serif;
Really though, the preferred font should be chosen by the designers, not by a committee of
developers, IMO.
Ryan Kaldari
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