Just heard back from the font people at RedHat. They confirmed that Liberation Sans is missing some needed data in its glyph positioning (GPOS) table. You can read more about GPOS tables here: http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/opentype/index_table_formats2.htm.... They say they are going to try to work on this sometime in the next few weeks. If any of you know about font development, feel free to chip in: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1072095
So given that Liberation Sans has some technical and style issues (incomplete GPOS in 2.0, bad kerning in 1.0), do people support putting it at the top of the stack? Arimo has also been discussed as an option. It is stylistically virtually identical to Liberation Sans (but without any kerning problems) and has much better rendering of combining characters. Should we put Arimo at the top of the stack instead? The only downside is that it has an extremely small installation base (Chrome OS). What do people think of the following stack:
Arimo, Liberation Sans, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
Ryan Kaldari
On Mon, Mar 3, 2014 at 11:57 AM, Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.orgwrote:
I spent most of Friday working on font evaluation with the designers. First I presented them with a blind "taste test" of 10 potential body fonts. 7 of them were FOSS fonts, 3 were commercial. Each one was used to render an identical section of Lorem Ipsum text in a MedaWiki page. Each font was given a "style" score based on readability, neutrality, and "authority" (does the font look like it conveys reliable information). Interestingly, of the 4 fonts that they preferred, 3 of them were the commercial fonts. The only FOSS font that scored highly was Liberation Sans.
Next, I did a blind technical evaluation. For this, I used each of the 10 fonts to render combining diacritics, ties, and other "obscure" Unicode features. Then I gave each font a score based on how many problems it had rendering the characters.
Finally, I researched the installation base of each font, i.e. what operating systems it is installed on by default and also gave scores for this.
The results can be seen at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Typography_refresh/Font_choice#Body_font_eval... .
The highest scoring fonts were: Arial, Helvetica, Helvetica Neue, and Liberation Sans, so I'm going to suggest that all of these fonts be included in the body stack, with the preference order based on the "style" scores. Although Liberation Sans and Helvetica Neue tied on the style score, I'm going to suggest that Liberation Sans go first since it is a FOSS font:
div#content { font-family: Liberation Sans, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; }
Additional feedback is welcome.
Ryan Kaldari
On Sat, Oct 26, 2013 at 9:43 AM, Brad Jorsch (Anomie) < bjorsch@wikimedia.org> wrote:
I came across Gerrit change 79948[1] today, which makes "VectorBeta" use a pile of non-free fonts (with one free font thrown in at the end as a sop). Is this really the direction we want to go, considering that in many other areas we prefer to use free software whenever we can?
Looking around a bit, I see this has been discussed in some "back corners"[2][3] (no offense intended), but not on this list and I don't see any place where free versus non-free was actually discussed rather than being brought up and then seemingly ignored.
In case it helps, I did some searching through mediawiki/core and WMF-deployed extensions for font-family directives containing non-free fonts. The results are at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Anomie/font-family (use of non-staff account intentional).
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