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:
.
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:
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(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:
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_eva…
.
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(a)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).
[1]:
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/79948
[2]:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Foundation_Design/Typography#…
[3]:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=44394
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