On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 02:56:42PM -0700, S Page wrote:
On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 10:20 AM, Erik Moeller
<erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Prioritizing freely licensed fonts while also
explicitly naming the
preferred non-free fonts seems like an easy fix.
Again, this is already done for us by fontconfig when presented with the
ASCII sequence "H e l v e t i c a". There's no reason for our font stack to
do it unless some freely-licensed font looks better than the non-free font;
also it will work against the brave and few who follow steps like
http://www.binarytides.com/gorgeous-looking-fonts-ubuntu-linux/ to adjust
the appearance of those well-known names.
The problem with relying on fontconfig instead of being explicit about
your choices, is that it's basically undefined behavior. On my system
fontconfig chooses Liberation Sans, on yours it might choose Roboto,
etc.
Maybe the designer doesn't care about which font is used as long as it's
Sans Serif, but in this case why would the CSS say "Helvetica" instead
of "sans-serif"? IOW, if one wants to be explicit about their font
choices, they might just as well be explicit across platforms.
(I don't know much about web design though, I could be wrong :)
Regards,
Faidon