On Friday, April 11, 2014, Erwin Dokter erwin@darcoury.nl wrote:
First, I like to aplologize to anyone who I may have come over too passionate at some times. Frustration is known to get the better of me, even though I should control that. (I also quit smoking.)
Much harder to quit than to find a perfect font stack that pleases everyone. :) Thanks for all your work on this Erwin.
Not sure where a new font stack should be discussed, so I'm just throwing it in here. Also, note I propose this for Latin wikis only.
Asuming we want the 'Helvetca' look for the body font:
font-family: "Nimbus Sans L", "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
Breakdown:
Nimbus Sans L - for Linux. This is the defacto helv font on Linux systems which result in an look similair to Mac/Windows. Windows will not match this font, as the Windows versions of the Nimbus font packages have different font family names (ie. 'NimbusSanL' instead of 'Nimbus Sans L').
This is the part I want to confirm and test. I want to be 100% sure that we are not gonna run in to the same ClearType rendering issues. (I have a Windows 7 laptop at my disposal that I can test with, as well as XP virtual machines.)
Helvetica Neue - for Mac. Like Nimbus, this should not match fonts on Windows (or Linux for that matter), as those copies for Windows have differen font family names (like 'Helvetica Neue LT Com 55 Roman').
Arial - For Windows. Positioned after Nimbus Sans and Helvetica Neue, so Mac and Linux do not match Arial, but positioned before Helvetica to prevent matching an inferiour Helvetica font that may be installed on some Windows machines.
Helvetica - Generic Helvetica fallback for any system not matching any of the previous fonts.
Putting this after Arial will avoid any Windows users getting a bad version of Helvetica rendered on their machines.
I'd like to test this locally on the English Wikipedia, and I am quit confident this makes everyone happy because 1) every OS should end up using a native font, and 2) it "promotes" a free font at the beginning of the stack (not a high priority in my book though).
Why don't we test this on Beta Labs and Mediawiki.org first instead of using enwiki as a guinea pig? We can make you a sysop there.
Next up I may think about the headers font stack; While Georgia is a good serif; I detest its use of text figures.
Times and Times New Roman are worse overall. ;)
Regards,
Erwin Dokter
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