On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 3:47 AM, Martijn Hoekstra <martijnhoekstra(a)gmail.com
wrote:
According to
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Typography_refresh/Font_choice#Body_font_eva…
sans scores 0 out of 10 points for "readability,
neutrality, and "authority" (does the font look like it conveys reliable
information)." Apparently the font is not readable, neutral or authoritive
at all, and completely unsuitable for the website. If it is in fact almost
completely unreadable it seems reasonable to override it, even if it is the
system default, but I have the feeling that there may be some hyperbole in
that table.
I marked that font test page as outdated. It's not updated for the new font
stack, and to be honest I don't think that just asking a random assortment
of people to vote on readability is really how we should evaluate our
options.
If you're designing in a vacuum, DejaVu Sans might be perfectly fine. But
it was not proposed or included in our font family settings because it's a
different style of sans than Helvetica (incl. Neue), Arial, Roboto (on
Android), and the other fonts specified. DejaVu, as well as its predecessor
Bitstream Vera, are humanist sans-serifs.[1] This style of sans has much
more personality to it, which isn't necessarily desirable if we want very
neutral typography. From a purely functional perspective, a more humanist
sans is less readable for very large text blocks because it is less uniform
in appearance between letterforms. (This is why, for instance, if you're
reading these long email threads in Gmail, Google sets Arial.)
That said, with
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=61470 it seems a terrible
idea to have Helvetica Neue in the font stack.
Helvetica regular also has problems in this regard. Other Mac fonts, like
Lucida Grande, are worse in other ways. None of them are perfect. Hence the
comments in the FAQ at
mediawiki.org/wiki/Typography_refresh in answer to
"Is there a perfect font that meets our readability needs in all scripts?
Do we think this is it?".
Steven
1. More about this at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sans-serif#Classification