On Mon, Mar 3, 2014 at 1:22 PM, Brad Jorsch (Anomie) bjorsch@wikimedia.orgwrote:
What does "neutrality" mean in the context of a font?
I'm sure the designers could give a better explanation, but basically it means that the font doesn't have any noticeable "tone", i.e. it isn't whimsical, cool, futuristic, timid, loud, pretentious, etc. In other words, is the font basically "invisible", i.e. not distracting? This is an entirely subjective assessment, but apparently that's what designers are good at.
I'm having trouble figuring out what "authority" might actually mean
besides "Does this seem familiar to me from sites I use for reference?".
I think your description is probably entirely accurate.
Did they actually rate these separately, or was it just one number covering all three?
One number covering all three.
Something this subjective could probably do with a much more diverse sample.
Do you mean a more diverse sample of fonts, a more diverse sample of text, or a more diverse sample of evaluators?
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.
It seems to me that the technical evaluation doesn't need to be blind, you just look at "is the diacritic/tie/etc correctly positioned?".
True, I just made them blind for good measure :)
Are there any details on this technical evaluation? What exactly was tested, and in what ways did the fonts fail? Ideal IMO would be a table of images (or a big image laid out as a table).
You can see a sample from the technical tests in the file attached to this bug: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1072095
Sorry I don't have more documentation for that.
Were the technical results consistent across backends?
I haven't tested on different backends yet, but that's what part of what I was talking with Rob about today. Apparently the font hinting can cause significantly different rendering quality on different operating systems. Any help assessing this would be appreciated.
Ryan Kaldari