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(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:
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(a)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(a)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_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
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Foundation_Design/Typography#…
[3]:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=44394
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