I spent most of Friday working on font evaluation with the designers. First I presented them with a blind "taste test" of 10 potential body fonts. 7 of them were FOSS fonts, 3 were commercial. Each one was used to render an identical section of Lorem Ipsum text in a MedaWiki page. Each font was given a "style" score based on readability, neutrality, and "authority" (does the font look like it conveys reliable information). Interestingly, of the 4 fonts that they preferred, 3 of them were the commercial fonts. The only FOSS font that scored highly was Liberation Sans.
Next, I did a blind technical evaluation. For this, I used each of the 10 fonts to render combining diacritics, ties, and other "obscure" Unicode features. Then I gave each font a score based on how many problems it had rendering the characters. Finally, I researched the installation base of each font, i.e. what operating systems it is installed on by default and also gave scores for this. The results can be seen at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Typography_refresh/Font_choice#Body_font_evaluation . The highest scoring fonts were: Arial, Helvetica, Helvetica Neue, and Liberation Sans, so I'm going to suggest that all of these fonts be included in the body stack, with the preference order based on the "style" scores. Although Liberation Sans and Helvetica Neue tied on the style score, I'm going to suggest that Liberation Sans go first since it is a FOSS font: div#content { font-family: Liberation Sans, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; } Additional feedback is welcome. Ryan Kaldari On Sat, Oct 26, 2013 at 9:43 AM, Brad Jorsch (Anomie) <bjor...@wikimedia.org > wrote: > I came across Gerrit change 79948[1] today, which makes "VectorBeta" > use a pile of non-free fonts (with one free font thrown in at the end > as a sop). Is this really the direction we want to go, considering > that in many other areas we prefer to use free software whenever we > can? > > Looking around a bit, I see this has been discussed in some "back > corners"[2][3] (no offense intended), but not on this list and I don't > see any place where free versus non-free was actually discussed rather > than being brought up and then seemingly ignored. > > In case it helps, I did some searching through mediawiki/core and > WMF-deployed extensions for font-family directives containing non-free > fonts. The results are at > https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Anomie/font-family (use of > non-staff account intentional). > > > [1]: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/79948 > [2]: > https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Foundation_Design/Typography#Arial.3F_18136 > [3]: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=44394 > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
