On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 01:32:30PM +1100, Tim Starling wrote:
Yes, we should prefer to use free software. We should also strive to
ensure that our support for users on non-free platforms is optimal, as
long as that doesn't negatively impact on users of free platforms. So
I don't think it is a problem to specify non-free fonts in font lists.
It's a bit more complicated than that. Linux distros ship with
fontconfig (which is used by Cairo, which in turn is used by at least
Firefox). Fontconfig aliases fonts via a set of rules and the default
rules map popular non-free fonts to their free metric equivalents, or
generics. e.g.
$ fc-match Helvetica
n019003l.pfb: "Nimbus Sans L" "Regular"
$ fc-match Arial
LiberationSans-Regular.ttf: "Liberation Sans" "Regular"
$ fc-match "Courier New"
LiberationMono-Regular.ttf: "Liberation Mono" "Regular"
$ fc-match INVALID
DejaVuSans.ttf: "DejaVu Sans" "Book"
This effectively means that, for Linux, having the free fonts at the end
of the CSS font selection is probably[1] a no-op: the browser will
never fallback via the CSS, but match the first font on the list to an
equivalent found on the system via fontconfig's fallback mechanisms. It
will be an educated guess and possibly do the right thing but it won't
be what the web designer intended.
This basically strengthens your point: free fonts should be first in the
list.
Regards,
Faidon
[1]: I say "probably", because I vaguely remember the interactions
between Firefox & fontconfig to be complicated. Maybe they're being
smarter -- someone should test :)
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