On 14/04/14 23:49, Erwin Dokter wrote:
On 15-04-2014 00:55, Isarra Yos wrote:
Deemed better? Better how? But that's what I'm saying - if the
configuration is optimised for dejavu sans, nimbus won't be better at
all even if it is a better-engineered font (doubtful, though, it being
an arial clone from what I understand). Letters will be too close
together, sizes and hinting will be off, and that's not even going into
the whole rabbit hole of messing with what people are used to, which
seems to be the single biggest determining factor as to what they find
easy to read once the basics are covered...
The purpose of a font stack is to let the browser use the website's
font preference. So "but Arial is already the default on Windows" is
not a valid retort; we _want_ the browser to use Arial, even is it is
_not_ the default.
A website can prefer what it wants; that doesn't make it a good
practice. I keep asking WHY 'we' prefer this particular font because
there generally should be a good reason when going out of our way to
avoid responsive design; doing what works best for the platform is good
practice. Hence why we have an entirely separate layout for mobile, for
instance, and specific apps from some of them. Different desktop
platforms, too, are different.
Similarly, when people override their platform's defaults, generally
they have a good reason to do so. Considering this, we should have an
even better reason if we're going to go overriding those overrides -
especially if this is simply back to the defaults.
Nimbus fonts come from URW++, a respected foundry, and
their font are
quite well engineered. They released some of their fonts under a free
licence for the GhostScript project, but I do not know if the fonts
are still maintained (but I suspect so, as GhostScript has active
development).
It all boils down to preference. Of cource people are used to how
things look, but change is not always necessarily a bad thing.
Don't dismiss preference so blithely. The psychological processes that
go into determining preferences are huge; when our brains are
rearranging themselves based on what we're used to, dismissing that as
'just' preferring what we're used to makes no sense. The details of
particular character forms are relatively minor, of course, but like how
a language a person grew up on will shape all of their future
interactions with all languages, even in the short term we do come to
expect letters to be a certain way.
So yes, different people prefer different things. This is good. It means
we're still human.
-I