Just one thing: I expressed the idea of sticking to free fonts only because I *personally* believe it is the right thing to do. I have followed the discussion, I have tested the beta, this is my opinion, and I just wanted to expose it.
That's it. I'm no stakeholder in this task and I respect enormously the effort that many great people is putting in solving this puzzle of priorities. If the point of the "free fonts only" side is taken then I'm happy enough with whatever it is decided. The motivation of my reply was simply to clarify the bottom line of the free-font reasoning. I hope it was useful. If not, please ignore. Thank you for your patience and your work. On 12/24/2013 01:28 PM, Quim Gil wrote: > On 12/23/2013 06:06 PM, Jon Robson wrote: >> On 23 Dec 2013 17:18, "Ryan Kaldari" <[email protected]> wrote: >>> On the other side we have some vocal community members and developers who >> say that the preferred font must be a free font (but they don't say which). >> So what we end up with is a totally inconsistent experience which defeats >> the entire purpose of the typography update. >> >> This. We should go back to the community asking for this and get them to >> decide on a suitable free font similar to Helvetica since they have brought >> us into this discussion. Right now it seems like the camp that is agnostic >> about free fonts (myself included) is struggling to find a suitable >> alternative which seems unfair. If someone wants to see something happen >> they should be prepared to help make that happen. > > To be precise, what brought us into this discussion was the idea of > committing to certain proprietary fonts. > > The vocal community members are saying that Wikimedia / MediaWiki > shouldn't be pointing to any proprietary product when there are free > alternatives available. We just ask the designers to stick to the same > principles of free knowledge and free software everybody else is following. > > This is why this "side" has no strong opinion on specific fonts. We > agree that defining fonts is a task for designers, but still a task to > be performed under the same Wikimedia principles. > > The recurrent argument from the pro-proprietary-fonts side is that no > free font is as good and has the wide install base. Following this > argument we would have never started a free encyclopedia from scratch, > because in 2001 anybody with a computer would most likely have access to > better proprietary encyclopedias with wide distribution. > > But no, someone had a vision of a free encyclopedia that anyone can > edit, and now we have an amazing product. Following the same principle > and the same bet we should go for free fonts that anyone can edit. Fonts > that luckily we can choose (and eventually improve) without needing to > create them from scratch. We should do this despite the short term > inconveniences, aiming for the long term goal of a World with amazing > free fonts for everybody, perfectly suitable for our amazing projects. > > > > This is the first part of the discussion. If we don't agree on the > points above then we will probably keep arguing about the points below. > > > > If we agree on the points above then we have basically two strong > choices to reach consensus: > > 1. Choose the free fonts we want to commit to, seeing these fonts not > only as design objects but also as living open source projects we could > promote and get involved with. We should considering the translations > these free fonts have in systems missing them, but not being determined > by them. > > 2. Don't commit to any font. Point to serif / sans and let the browsers > do the rest. > > According to the discussion so far, there is a possible third choice (a > weak one) to find a compromise, choosing some free and non-free fonts. I > consider this argument weak because I believe it is originated by a lack > of consensus in the points above about the free knowledge mission and > its relation with font choices. > > > PS: if you really need a starting point for the selection of free fonts, > two typefaces that the Wikimedia community has already selected in the > past are Linux Libertine and Gill Sans -- > https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Visual_identity_guidelines > -- Quim Gil Technical Contributor Coordinator @ Wikimedia Foundation http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil _______________________________________________ Design mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
