On Mon, Apr 7, 2014 at 1:19 PM, Jon Robson jrobson@wikimedia.org wrote:
- Picking a new open font that is either
** widely available on Linux but not so much on Windows ** renders well in Windows
Coming back to the above option...
Today we spent some time testing a stack that puts Nimbus Sans L first, before Helvetica Neue. This is the font that currently most Linux users (we've tested on Ubuntu and Debian) are getting via matching to Helvetica regular. The thing we tested for primarily is how this font renders on Windows, for the users who may have it. So far it unfortunately appears that for Windows users with ClearType turned off, Nimbus Sans also suffers from bug 63512, like Liberation Sans does. (Screengrab from a Windows 7 machine I have for testing: http://i.imgur.com/pAHTu1f.png).
I would like to keep trying to find a freely-licensed font that A) matches the other neutral sans-serifs that we have specified and B) which we feel comfortable putting first in the stack, meaning that it renders well on Windows, Linux, and Mac on major browsers. So far we are still coming up short.
[I am copying the above to the Talk page on mediawiki.org in case anyone else is interested.]