Talk:Design/Typography/LQT Archive 1

About the use of Webfonts
It has been argued that Arial is a safe choice for the default typeface due to its availability. Using webfonts (+ Arial as fallback) could be a compatible solution that would offer more options in terms of typography.

From the technical side, I think there is already webfont support through a MediaWiki extension for displaying non-latin scripts. Pginer (talk) 12:23, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

Bold italic
Sometimes bold and italics are called for; for example, when convention asks us to bold a key term (as in the lead of an encyclopedia article), but that key term is the title of a work that should be italicized, or a Latin binomial taxon. LtPowers (talk) 13:41, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Arial?
Even before people get to the aesthetic qualities of Arial and its non-free licensing, there is a practical problem with it: It is nowhere near being a "global typeface", as this page suggests, because it covers very few writing systems: Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic and maybe Thai. It doesn't even cover Latin, Cyrillic and Greek well and has a lot missing characters.

Forcing Arial on languages that it doesn't support is pointless: they will change it in local CSS anyway. This includes languages of West Africa, which are written in Latin, but use many characters that Arial doesn't have.

I don't quite understand why should we specify an explicit font-family in the first place. People who read in languages for which fonts are easily available should be able to use their own preferred font (unless Wikipedia wants to create a unique identity for itself, but Arial is obviously not a font for unique identity). For people who read languages that Arial doesn't support at all it can a be a problem - millions of people still use browsers that don't support fallback fonts, and they will be forced to see squares instead of letters. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 08:51, 9 August 2012 (UTC)

First line indentation
Is there any consideration of indenting first lines of paragraphs, like in books?

Some Wikipedias use it already, for example Thai and Ossetic. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 08:51, 9 August 2012 (UTC)

Line spacing - footnotes
One important consideration in line spacing is the placement of supertext footnote references. These create uneven line spacing currently. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 09:13, 9 August 2012 (UTC)

Line spacing - languages with many diacritics
Some languages use more diacritics than others. This is relevant for Latin-based languages, like Vietnamese and Min Nan, where the diacritics are far more complicated than in languages like French. And it is also relevant for Indic and Southeast Asian languages, which have a lot of signs above and below the the line. Currently in core these languages ask for larger line-height (see skins/common/shared.css).

This is an important consideration. Maybe the line spacing should just be increased for all languages. And maybe only for some languages, but the code that does it should be cleaner and more robust than it is now. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 09:13, 9 August 2012 (UTC)