On Mon, Mar 3, 2014 at 2:57 PM, Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.org wrote:
I spent most of Friday working on font evaluation with the designers.
[...]
given a "style" score based on readability, neutrality, and "authority" (does the font look like it conveys reliable information).
What does "neutrality" mean in the context of a font?
I'm having trouble figuring out what "authority" might actually mean besides "Does this seem familiar to me from sites I use for reference?".
Did they actually rate these separately, or was it just one number covering all three?
Something this subjective could probably do with a much more diverse sample.
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?".
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).
Were the technical results consistent across backends?