Hi, a few days ago I learned that the WMF design team selected "Arial as our global typeface for all content and interface elements."
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Design/Typography#Typefa...
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.
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
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
On 01/05/2013 07:14 PM, Krinkle wrote:
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;
I'm good with that.
Matt Flaschen
Does anyone have a legitimate, realistic, technically sound reason why "Libertine Sans" should be chosen over Arial other than "it's free and open sourced"? Have we thought about all of the technical issues (such as being readable in ancient browsers, or even browsers that don't support css)?
I've no real opinion in any direction, mind you, except that I want to make sure we serve the greatest selection of users possible.
(Fwiw, the reason Arial was chosen was because a) it's sans-serif and b) it's available on a massive percentage of machines in toto.)
On Jan 5, 2013, at 8:03 PM, Matthew Flaschen mflaschen@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 01/05/2013 07:14 PM, Krinkle wrote:
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;
I'm good with that.
Matt Flaschen
Design mailing list Design@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
--- Brandon Harris, Senior Designer, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
On 01/05/2013 11:17 PM, Brandon Harris wrote:
Does anyone have a legitimate, realistic, technically sound reason why "Libertine Sans" should be chosen over Arial other than "it's free and open sourced"?
It's Liberation Sans. We're not talking about a zero-sum choice, just about the order.
Have we thought about all of the technical issues (such as being readable in ancient browsers, or even browsers that don't support css)?
Ancient browsers (and the computers they're on) will almost certainly not have Liberation Sans, so it will just skip over it harmlessly. Obviously, if a browser doesn't support CSS, it's going to ignore whatever we put in a CSS file (Arial-only, both, whatever).
I've no real opinion in any direction, mind you, except that I want to make sure we serve the greatest selection of users possible.
I agree, and no one is suggesting we just put Liberation Sans. The way font-family fallbacks work is well-established, cross-browser, and goes back to CSS 1 (and IE *3*, just to give you an idea). It just picks the first font in the list that it can render.
(Fwiw, the reason Arial was chosen was because a) it's sans-serif and b) it's available on a massive percentage of machines in toto.)
True, but there's no need to pick just one. A lot of sites use font-family chains. At least, we should probably have sans-serif at the end of the chain.
Matt Flaschen
2013/1/6 Matthew Flaschen mflaschen@wikimedia.org
On 01/05/2013 11:17 PM, Brandon Harris wrote:
Does anyone have a legitimate, realistic, technically sound reason why "Libertine Sans" should be chosen over Arial other than "it's free and open sourced"?
It's Liberation Sans. We're not talking about a zero-sum choice, just about the order.
Have we thought about all of the technical issues (such as being readable in ancient browsers, or even browsers that don't support css)?
Ancient browsers (and the computers they're on) will almost certainly not have Liberation Sans, so it will just skip over it harmlessly.
Yes, and this is a fine solution for Latin-based languages.
Also, the Free licensing of Liberation Sans makes it *possible* to be used in the WebFonts and Universal Language Selector extensions. It can be optional, of course; for example, for English it can be optional, but for more exotic languages, like Lingala or Igbo, it can be made available as a web font. In this regard it is better than Arial, because its character inventory is richer.
And finally, the usual reminder from Language engineering: this only solves the issue for Latin-, Cyrillic-, and Greek-based languages. They constitute a large chunk of the languages we serve, but they are many that Liberation Sans doesn't cover. So our CSS must be language-aware, and not just in non-English projects, but in all of them. (This probably deserves another thread.)
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
On 01/06/2013 12:17 AM, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
2013/1/6 Matthew Flaschen mflaschen@wikimedia.org
On 01/05/2013 11:17 PM, Brandon Harris wrote:
Does anyone have a legitimate, realistic, technically sound reason why "Libertine Sans" should be chosen over Arial other than "it's free and open sourced"?
Note than "it's free and open sourced" is an important reason when we are "dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content".
It's Liberation Sans. We're not talking about a zero-sum choice, just about the order.
Is there a reason not to default to Liberation Sans and have Arial as secondary choice?
About i18n not covered by Liberation Sans, it would be useful to identify the default free typefaces to be used for other scripts. No need to organize a research on this, just documenting at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Design/Typography the best options as we need / find them is better than having nothing.
On 01/08/2013 04:11 PM, Quim Gil wrote:
Note than "it's free and open sourced" is an important reason when we are "dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content".
I agree. Being "viewable or playable by free software tools" is an important part of our value statement. However, in this case there's really no trade-off, since Arial-only users lose nothing.
It's Liberation Sans. We're not talking about a zero-sum choice, just about the order.
Is there a reason not to default to Liberation Sans and have Arial as secondary choice?
As I said, I'm fine with that, and I explained why I don't think it will cause problems in any of the scenarios we're considering (computer without Liberation Sans, computer without CSS, computer with both Liberation and Arial).
Matt Flaschen
Technically, since Liberation Sans and Arial are default options on some platforms, just indicating the "sans-serif" generic family may be even better than specifying a list of default fonts such as "Helvetica, Arial Liberation Sans, Sans-Serif" (more about this herehttp://css-tricks.com/sans-serif/ ).
From the design perspective, it is good to have visual consistency across
platforms and languages (especially when content in different scripts may appear together). No font family I know of will meet both:
- Platform availability is not a big issue IMHO, webfonts can be used to deliver 92% of users would be able to use the selected font (according to this http://caniuse.com/fontface) and the rest of users will fallback to their system default for "sans-serif". Using webfonts has some extra cost but I am assuming that we are getting a benefit in terms of readability in the chosen font compared to the default system one that makes it worth using it. - Language availability is a bigger problem. Which even with webfonts cannot be always solved due to lack of distributable fonts. The Noto font family http://code.google.com/p/noto/ created by Google has the goal of providing visual harmonization (e.g., compatible heights and stroke thicknesses) across multiple languages which makes it a good candidate in terms of cross-language consistency. The list of supported scripts http://code.google.com/p/noto/wiki/FontList is large compared to others (e.g., see Adobe Source Pro roadmaphttps://github.com/adobe/source-sans-pro/blob/master/Roadmap.txt) but not complete yet.
Pau
On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 10:17 PM, Matthew Flaschen mflaschen@wikimedia.orgwrote:
On 01/08/2013 04:11 PM, Quim Gil wrote:
Note than "it's free and open sourced" is an important reason when we are "dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content".
I agree. Being "viewable or playable by free software tools" is an important part of our value statement. However, in this case there's really no trade-off, since Arial-only users lose nothing.
It's Liberation Sans. We're not talking about a zero-sum choice, just about the order.
Is there a reason not to default to Liberation Sans and have Arial as secondary choice?
As I said, I'm fine with that, and I explained why I don't think it will cause problems in any of the scenarios we're considering (computer without Liberation Sans, computer without CSS, computer with both Liberation and Arial).
Matt Flaschen
Design mailing list Design@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design