Hi everyone,
I wanted to give everyone an update from an in-person conversation I had with Ryan (see...see...I do talk to people in person!) :-) Ryan and crew, I'm really glad you all are following through with documentation and doing all of the testing you are. Thank you!
If we're going to bias toward Liberation Sans based on the install base, we need to make sure we're testing with the version of Liberation Sans which is actually in widespread distribution in the context it'll be used (Linux). I believe that is the 1.07.* for Ubuntu at least, and I think that's true for the other Linux distros as well, due to some still unresolved(?) hinting problems with Liberation Sans 2.00. This is made tougher by the fact that I think Red Hat is distributing a font billed as 1.07 on their website, but I think is in fact 2.00 when you open up the tarball. I'm not positive about this...I spent a lot of time on this a couple weekends ago, and haven't touched it since, so I could be a bit rusty on it and may have been misreading things. It may also be that Liberation Sans 1.07.x has better diacritic support than Liberation Sans 2.00. Based on what Ryan showed me with 2.00, it's got a number of technical issues.
In lieu of finding a reliable source to download Liberation Sans 1.07.x, I sent Ryan a copy of 1.07.3 from my machine, which I believe he's in the process of working with now.
Rob
On Mon, Mar 3, 2014 at 12:58 PM, Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.orgwrote:
Yes, we only looked at Latin fonts. We are working on an FAQ, however, that explains how wikis that use non-Latin scripts can specify their own font stack using MediaWiki:Vector.css.
Ryan Kaldari
On Mon, Mar 3, 2014 at 12:26 PM, Alolita Sharma <asharma@wikimedia.org
wrote:
Ryan,
This is useful. Am I assuming accurately that you looked only at Latin language fonts focused on English. Did you consider Google webfonts too.
I would be interested in reusing your test criteria for other language fonts too. Thanks for your efforts so far.
Best Alolita On Mar 3, 2014 11:57 AM, "Ryan Kaldari" rkaldari@wikimedia.org 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_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).
[2]:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Foundation_Design/Typography#A...
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