On Mon, Apr 7, 2014 at 3:42 PM, Jon Robson <jdlrobson(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I noticed from Kaldari's notes [1] that "Open
sans" was rejected based
on language support and install base. I notice however that it is
pretty popular on the web [2,3]. Can someone elaborate on these
results as it is surprised me?
To me we can learn from this experience that install base (especially
where Windows is concerned) is probably not such an important factor.
The language support is more of an issue, but I wonder if this can be
resolved by specific font stacks with more suitable open fonts is
provided.
To improve install base we can easily iterate on this and start using
web fonts in some form in the future.
[1]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Typography_refresh/Font_choice#Body_font_eva…
[2]
http://www.typeandgrids.com/blog/the-ten-most-popular-web-fonts-of-2013
[3]
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/03/12/taking-a-second-look-at-free-fon…
A similar example is Google's Noto font (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noto_fonts). It has basically no default
install base that I'm aware of, but it's focused on readability in as many
scripts as possible and is Apache-licensed.