Ryan, *thank you* very much for the research, and for contacting the Liberation Sans maintainers with specific bugs.
On 03/05/2014 02:00 PM, Ryan Kaldari wrote:
What do people think of the following stack:
Arimo, Liberation Sans, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
After so much discussion, it would be useful to have a table showing which fonts are rendered by the most popular browsers in the most popular platforms [1] when you specify
a) sans-serif;
b) Arimo, Liberation Sans, sans-serif;
c) Arimo, Liberation Sans, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
This way we can see what happens exactly when you define fonts or not, when you define only free fonts or also proprietary. We will also be able to see where exactly this picture differs from the vision of the promoters of proprietary fonts.
I think this table is going to be useful to defend the decision, regardless of which decision is made.
Based on the results we might conclude that e.g. there is no need to specify Helvetica / Arial because they are already picked by the browsers that would display them when explicitly specified.
We might also find out where does Helvetica Neue appear or not based on each option, and this would open the possibility to file bugs or provide feedback to the specific projects.
Imagine if all this discussion could be solved by proposing a patch to the Webkit project, just defining Helvetica Neue as a fallback for Arimo and Liberation Sans.
[1] Proposed browsers:
Chrome (Windows, Mac) Firefox (Windows, Mac) MSIE Safari Android iPhone iPad
http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportClients.htm