Hi, It seems you’re debating substituting fonts that have little in common: geometric slab serif vs. transitional serif or rational serif, hinted vs. unhinted, wide language and phonetic coverage vs. European language coverage, open source and maintained vs. unmodifiable.
Maybe if you defined criteria, you'd be able to choose with empirical arguments rather than just throwing likes and don’t-likes. Have you considered using CSS3 @font-face webfonts? Using webfonts could mean the same font is used on all platforms with similar outcome (style, quality, coverage, maintainability). Cheers, On Sat, Dec 21, 2013 at 9:30 AM, Jared Zimmerman <[email protected]> wrote: > Ryan, what about the argument that the font system will automatically do a > replacement for Helvetia neue, rather than going to the next font in the > list, effectively putting the choice in some Linux developers hands rather > that ours? > > Sent while mobile > > On Dec 20, 2013, at 5:51 PM, Ryan Kaldari <[email protected]> wrote: > > The main reason I suggested using Linux Libertine as the 'preferred' header > font instead of DejuVu Serif is that DejaVu Serif doesn't at all resemble > Georgia (the proprietary font the designers wanted). It's almost a slab-serif > font, which is very different from the book/antique serifs of fonts like > Georgia and Times. The designers wanted a classic, "encyclopedic" looking > font for the headers. DejaVu Serif is a workhorse font, not a > presentation/display font. It's appeal lies in its support for thousands of > Unicode characters, definitely not in its design (which is frankly pretty > awful). On pretty much any Linux system, specifying DejaVu Serif in the CSS > is going to be redundant anyway, since most of the popular Linux installs > fall back to DejaVu Serif as the default 'serif' font anyway. Thus any > characters that can't get rendered in the preferred fonts will get rendered > in DejaVu anyway. > > When choosing the order of fonts in a CSS stack, you always put the prettiest > ones first, and the most widely installed ones last. In the current case, > we're doing it backwards. > > I'm also open to using 'Nimbus Roman No9 L', which is more widely installed > than Linux Libertine, but a lot nicer to look at than DejaVu Serif. It's > basically a Times Roman replacement. Another option would be Liberation > Serif, which is pretty ugly, but still nicer than DejaVu Serif. > > My preferred font-stack for the headers would be: > font-family: "Linux Libertine", Georgia, "Nimbus Roman No9 L", serif; > > Really though, the preferred font should be chosen by the designers, not by a > committee of developers, IMO. > > Ryan Kaldari > _______________________________________________ > Design mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design > > _______________________________________________ > Design mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design -- Denis Moyogo Jacquerye African Network for Localisation http://www.africanlocalisation.net/ Nkótá ya Kongó míbalé --- http://info-langues-congo.1sd.org/ DejaVu fonts --- http://www.dejavu-fonts.org/ _______________________________________________ Design mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
