Thanks for the update Ryan and for investing your effort in this
considering the typography refresh it is a spare time project! I'm
excited to see the results.

What about headings? Are you going to run similar tests?

On Mon, Mar 3, 2014 at 11:57 AM, Ryan Kaldari <[email protected]> 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_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) <[email protected]
>> 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
>>
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-- 
Jon Robson
* http://jonrobson.me.uk
* https://www.facebook.com/jonrobson
* @rakugojon

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