On 10/29/2013 06:30 PM, S Page wrote:
This seems right. I repeat, there is no benefit to putting the free names first, unless designers think they look better.
One important benefit is that we encourage use of free fonts, even when both free and proprietary fonts are installed. This fits with our support for free software throughout the movement.
I completely agree we should choose great free fonts that fit our intended design.
Most popular Linux variants specify an equivalent FOSS font for "Helvetica" that ships with the OS for exactly this scenario, ensuring that users get a decent approximation of the proprietary font's appearance by some FOSS font.
For the record (and I think similar to what you said), this may be the case for Helvetica, but not necessarily Helvetica Neue. On my machine, fc-match gives
'Helvetica' => "Nimbus Sans L" "Regular"' 'Helvetica Neue' => "DejaVu Sans" "Book" 'Made-up font name' => "DejaVu Sans" "Book"
Nimbus Sans L is indeed based on Helvetica (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimbus_Sans_L). I think the other two are just last-ditch fallbacks (hence why it's the same for 'Made-up font name').
I set up http://jsfiddle.net/UPBUH/ as a quick testing ground. When I check the Fonts tab of Firefox's Web Console (not Firebug), it shows "Nimbus Sans L Bold system". Used as: "Nimbus Sans L".
I think that means fc is looking through the whole stack and picking Nimbus Sans L as the best match. I think corroborates what you said earlier ("fontconfig will use the first font in the font stack that has a positive match.")
S, can I ask what you see for that fiddle on the same console tab?
A few brave users customize the matching behavior because they prefer something else, or they read some how-to article. If we put the free names first, we just frustrate those efforts, and the experience of 90% of our users doesn't change.
If we put the free font first, we're saying we want to use that free font (because it's a free, and fits our intended design well).
The extremely few users who manually customize their font-matching can still override e.g. what "Nimbus Sans L" points to on their machine.
A font stack is inherently undefined behavior :) Yes we get somewhat unspecified behavior for a small subset of our users, but on balance it's better and more freedom-y to let them evolve a better FOSS version of the notion of "Helvetica" than nailing them to 2012's fallback "Nimbus Sans L".
Who says we have to nail anything down? We can choose Nimbus Sans L initially and then put a similar but better free font first later.
Matt Flaschen