Thanks for doing this research!
I notice that while Liberation Sans got a high score for appearance, it got
a very low technical score... Since it is a FOSS project <
we should attempt to file bug
reports with Red Hat about any problems we discover, and/or post our
findings on the fedora-fonts mailing list.
-- brion
On Mon, Mar 3, 2014 at 11:57 AM, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:
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_eva…
.
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) <
bjorsch(a)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#…
[3]:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=44394
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