On Sat, Dec 21, 2013 at 4:09 AM, Denis Jacquerye <moyogo@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,

It seems you’re debating substituting fonts that have little in
common: geometric slab serif vs. transitional serif or rational serif,
hinted vs. unhinted, wide language and phonetic coverage vs. European
language coverage, open source and maintained vs. unmodifiable.

Maybe if you defined criteria, you'd be able to choose with empirical
arguments rather than just throwing likes and don’t-likes.

Have you considered using CSS3 @font-face webfonts? Using webfonts
could mean the same font is used on all platforms with similar outcome
(style, quality, coverage, maintainability).

Yes, the problem is that we have two mutually exclusive requirements and no communication between the two opposing camps. On one side, the designers have said that the preferred body font should be Helvetica Neue (or Helvetica) and the header font should be Georgia. On the other side we have some vocal community members and developers who say that the preferred font must be a free font (but they don't say which). So what we end up with is a totally inconsistent experience which defeats the entire purpose of the typography update.

I agree that what we really need is a list of font requirements, not a list of fonts. This list should include both aesthetic and technical requirements. For example:

Header Font Requirements:
* Includes all glyphs for Basic Latin (ASCII) and Latin-1 Supplement (0080–00FF)
* Includes at least 90% of Latin Extended-A (0100–017F)
* Is installed by default on at least 1 common operating system
* Easy to read at large and medium text sizes
* Non-distracting design (readers should not notice the font)
* Traditional serifs (for an "authoritative", encyclopedic look)

Body Font Requirements:
* Includes all glyphs for Basic Latin (ASCII), Latin-1 Supplement (0080–00FF), and Latin Extended-A (0100–017F)
* Includes at least 90% of Latin Extended-B (0180–024F) and IPA Extensions (0250–02AF)
* Is installed by default on at least 1 common operating system
* Renders common ligatures correctly (many fonts do not)
* Easy to read at medium, small, and very small text sizes (tall x-height)
* Non-distracting design (readers should not notice the font)
* Sans-serif
* Uses most common variants of variable Latin letters, for example, two story lower-case "a" and single-story lower-case "g"

These are just some examples of course. If we had such a list of requirements, we could hopefully use it to construct a font-stack that is consistent and that everyone (or at least more than one person) agrees on :)

Ryan Kaldari