On Sat, Feb 15, 2014 at 11:52 PM, Denis Jacquerye <moyogo@gmail.com> wrote:
Maybe I haven't looked in the right place, but why aren’t webfonts being considered?

Webfonts would mean the same fonts can be delivered everywhere, relying on installed font only as a last resort.
There are more options than just the 4 fonts mentioned (DejaVu Serif, Nimbus Roman No9 L, Linux Libertine, Liberation Sans): PT Sans/PT Serif, Droid Sans/Droid Serif and likes (Open Sans, Noto), the other Liberation fonts and likes (Arimo, Tinos), Source Sans, Roboto, Ubuntu, Clear Sans, if you just want hinted fonts and household names.

I’ll also point out that Georgia is a great font originally designed for small size, and Helvetica Neue/Helvetica/Arial was originally designed for display. When it comes to language coverage both are lacking but that cannot be fixed easily.

To add on to what Jared said... 

On webfonts: it's not just that it would take "more research". We have already tried webfonts and failed miserably so far. UniversalLanguageSelector is an example of how even the most well-intentioned efforts in this area can face serious setbacks. Keep in mind also that this typography work is largely being done with volunteer or side project time from myself, the developers, and most of the designers. We are simply not prepared to implement and test a webfonts system to work at Wikipedia scale.

There are many gorgeous, well-localized free fonts out there... but few that meet our design goals are delivered universally in popular mobile and desktop operating systems. We can't get a consistent and more readable experience without delivering those as webfonts, and webfonts are not practically an option open to us right now. Maybe in the future we will get (as Jared says) a foundry to donate a custom free font for us, or maybe we'll just use a gorgeous free font out there now, like Open Baskerville or Open Sans. 

For now, however, we get the following result from the Typography Refresh beta feature: 
  1. the vast majority of our 500 billion or more users get a more readable experience 
  2. we unify the typography across mobile and desktop devices, which is a good thing for both Wikimedia and third party users of Vector/MobileFrontEnd
  3. individual users and individual wikis can still change their CSS as needed and desired 
  4. we don't jeopardize Vector and MediaWiki's status as FOSS, by not distributing nor creating a dependency on any proprietary software whatsoever. Thank you, CSS font-family property and fallbacks.  
That all sounds like a pretty good way to maintain freedom while improving readability and consistency to me. 

--
Steven Walling,
Product Manager