On 28/10/13 02:32, Tim Starling wrote:
There is the separate issue that on my Linux laptop, Nimbus Sans L looks worse than the font my browser will choose for sans-serif. That is because I have customised Firefox to use the Ubuntu font for sans-serif, which is very readable. I find all the Arial clones to be too narrow for comfortable reading.
-- Tim Starling
That reminds me of something of a point folks tend to forget - generally the system font is chosen in part just because it renders well with the system font renderer, so overriding that can have unexpected side effects in terms of legibility. How the same font (or its clone) renders can vary significantly across systems, so even if a font type looks good on a mac, for instance, it may look bad on windows or even be downright unreadable on linux with a fontconfig which simply wasn't written with the specific font in mind.
I found this to be a good part why arial was so damn unreadable on my linux setup, for instance, though even with it rendering properly now it's still narrower than I find comfortable as well. Perhaps this is just because I'm used to wider, but going against what people are used to (and thus have effectively trained their brains upon), or especially what they might have specifically customised (in particular large or dyslexic fonts come to mind as a specific usability issue here), also seems like an odd move.
And yes, I know it's a standard move that websites tend to make. It's still odd, and I can't say I like that folks are trying to take mediawiki/wikimedia in a similar direction, even without the question of whether or not the specifics are free or not.