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(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote:
Brad Jorsch (Anomie) wrote:
On Sat, Oct 26, 2013 at 12:52 PM, MZMcBride
<z(a)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]
[1]:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre
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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