On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 3:47 AM, Martijn Hoekstra <martijnhoekstra@gmail.com
wrote:
According to
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Typography_refresh/Font_choice#Body_font_eval... sans scores 0 out of 10 points for "readability, neutrality, and "authority" (does the font look like it conveys reliable information)." Apparently the font is not readable, neutral or authoritive at all, and completely unsuitable for the website. If it is in fact almost completely unreadable it seems reasonable to override it, even if it is the system default, but I have the feeling that there may be some hyperbole in that table.
I marked that font test page as outdated. It's not updated for the new font stack, and to be honest I don't think that just asking a random assortment of people to vote on readability is really how we should evaluate our options.
If you're designing in a vacuum, DejaVu Sans might be perfectly fine. But it was not proposed or included in our font family settings because it's a different style of sans than Helvetica (incl. Neue), Arial, Roboto (on Android), and the other fonts specified. DejaVu, as well as its predecessor Bitstream Vera, are humanist sans-serifs.[1] This style of sans has much more personality to it, which isn't necessarily desirable if we want very neutral typography. From a purely functional perspective, a more humanist sans is less readable for very large text blocks because it is less uniform in appearance between letterforms. (This is why, for instance, if you're reading these long email threads in Gmail, Google sets Arial.)
That said, with https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=61470 it seems a terrible idea to have Helvetica Neue in the font stack.
Helvetica regular also has problems in this regard. Other Mac fonts, like Lucida Grande, are worse in other ways. None of them are perfect. Hence the comments in the FAQ at mediawiki.org/wiki/Typography_refresh in answer to "Is there a perfect font that meets our readability needs in all scripts? Do we think this is it?".
Steven
1. More about this at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sans-serif#Classification