So I'll just make a few brief, general points:
* It might be nice for the design folks to weigh in here with their thoughts on font selection.
* We traditionally didn't specify a lot of fonts at all, meaning you got whatever default fonts were configured on your system: thus, non-free fonts like Arial or Helvetica for the vast majority of visitors.
* Where we do specify non-free fonts among the font-family lists, remember we don't ship those fonts -- they are used only if they are present and another font doesn't outrank them.
* Where we do ship fonts (via UniversalLanguageSelector/WebFonts) they are free fonts.
* Font selection can be completely overridden via CSS; if someone has the interest one could create a Gadget that lets you totally customize your font experience in a user-friendly way.
I'll also add this:
* It would be _awesome_ if we sponsored creation or maintenance of good free base fonts for body and header text, and used those consistently. But that's not a trivial endeavor; what effort has been spent on custom fonts has been for reasons of language support.
-- brion
On Sat, Oct 26, 2013 at 1:18 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Brad Jorsch (Anomie) wrote:
On Sat, Oct 26, 2013 at 12:52 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
There's an open question in my mind as to what constitutes a "non-free font,"
In this context, I mean "non-free" in the context of libre rather than gratis.[1]
Right. The "libre" part is what I consider a legal issue, though I think I understand more clearly now that you're talking about technical policy here.
There are a number of fonts that can be downloaded for free (gratis) but are under terms along the lines of a CC -NC or -ND license, and there are more that are distributed with various popular operating systems so many people already have them for "free" in the loosest sense. I'm not counting these as free here.
Thank you for clarifying this point. It might be helpful to have a list of gratis/libre fonts and a list of gratis/non-libre fonts, if such lists don't exist already.
As far as I know, MediaWiki (core) has historically preferred to specify nothing more than sans-serif. There now seems to be a trend away from this.
<https://www.wikimedia.org/wiki/Guiding_principles#Freedom_and_open_source
is a citation for my earlier claim that Wikimedia prefers free to non-free. Nemo_bis pointed me toward this related discussion as well: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/design/2012-October/000191.html.
MZMcBride
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