On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 10:59 AM, Martijn Hoekstra
<martijnhoekstra(a)gmail.com> wrote:
So, the font stack changes with regards to the status
quo now change
nothing for Windows users, changes Helvetica -> Helvetica neue for Mac
users and changes Arial, DejaVu Sans or Arimo for possibly something else,
amongst which Nimbus Sans L, maybe, maybe not.
Actually, it's a bit more complicated. All users get serif fonts for
headings, which they didn't before and which is probably the biggest
visual before/after difference. The serif fonts still prioritize
free/libre fonts over non-free ones.
The body fonts prioritized free/libre fonts on deployments, but for
Windows users without ClearType/anti-aliasing, those render very
poorly, so they were disabled shortly after deployment. This is now
causing people to be upset because the initial agreement to never
prioritize non-free fonts is no longer maintained for the body.
Odder's patch would revert to sans-serif as a generic classification
for the body, but doesn't touch the font specification for the headers
(yet). The commit summary is a bit misleading in that regard.
There's some additional discussion about Georgia as a font choice due
to its use of text figures (AKA old-style numerals), which some people
find look odd in headings with numbers, especially in non-Latin
scripts where old-style numerals may not be commonly encountered. Due
to this, some are arguing for also changing the style for headings to
serif (_not_ sans-serif) as a generic classification, or removing
Georgia from the stack. That particular issue hasn't been discussed in
detail yet, as far as I can see.
I think the differences of opinion here are not worth a holy war.
Prioritizing a non-free font before free ones for the _body_ with a
clear FIXME indicating that this is not a desirable state is IMO only
marginally different from reverting to sans-serif until we have a
free/libre font that _can_ be prioritized for the body. So I think
either outcome should be OK for the short term, and we should focus on
the longer term question of a good font stack for the body that
prioritizes free/libre fonts.
Let's not polarize each other too much. All the arguments I've heard
have been fundamentally reasonable and rational, not just "Change is
evil". Some people hate the serifs per se, but that's a smaller
discussion compared to these conversations, which are about
substantial things that can be reasoned about.
Erik
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation