On 11/04/14 18:42, Bartosz DziewoĆski wrote:
I have merged the Gerrit change (https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/124475/), restoring the body font to "sans-serif". The heading font is unchanged for now.
I've read the entire wikitech-l thread (89 emails as of writing) and pondered this carefully. My summary of the situation is:
- This font stack, according to WMF Design, only provides real improvements for Macs (~6% of Wikimedia sites visitors per
http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOperatingSystems.htm) and should be (nearly) identical to defaults for other systems. However, it causes major rendering issues for an unspecified number of Windows and Linux users (especially with, respectively, Helvetica and Nimbus Sans L; see both open and closed dependencies of bug 63549).
- This font stack also apparently causes issues with non-Latin-script languages (not very well-specified ones, though; more bug reports like bug 63817 would be welcome); it's serious enough for at least one affected Wikimedia wiki (the Japanese Wikipedia) to have already reset the stack to "sans-serif". This might affect the serif heading fonts more than the sans-serif body fonts (again, more precise reports needed).
- The wikitech-l discussion, as well as various on-wiki discussions (e.g. on WP:VPT on the English Wikipedia) have been overwhelmingly in favor of restoring the plain "sans-serif" font definition.
- Orthogonally to these issues, all other aspects of the typography refresh have been generally considered successful and minor problems with them have been quickly fixed.
Other issues with it have largely been drowned out, or were never brought up here due to the scope of the discussion (things like contrast issues causing eyestrain, for instance, are distinct from foss ideology, fonts or windows). Depending on what they are, they may or may not be relatively minor; without going into them it's hard to say. I'd suggest starting a new thread for that, though.
In conclusion we should all make waffles.
-L