Typography refresh/Font choice

This document is in development, see history for sources.

Current situation
The status quo in MediaWiki core is as follows: for prose, we specify simply "sans-serif" for all text. This results in the following fonts:


 * Windows: Arial
 * Mac OSX: Helvetica
 * Ubuntu/Firefox: DejaVu Sans (presumably other Linux variants are similar)
 * Ubuntu/Chrome: Liberation Sans
 * Android: Roboto
 * iOS: Helvetica

Note that the differences between Firefox and Chrome on Linux seem to stem from Firefox using the OS-standard font resolution mechanism, and Chrome having a built-in heuristic that seems to be very heavily biased toward Liberation Sans.

VectorBeta effects
Currently being explored at /Test/.

For generic context, see.

State of the art on fonts
Here is what seems to be a reasonably well-researched article where the author has clearly put a lot of thought into the cross-platform experience, with the added bonus that it proposes use of free (libre) fonts: http://www.grputland.com/2013/11/multiplatform-helvetica-like-font-stack.html

tl;dr: His stack still lists HelveticaNeue as the first font, but proposes Arimo as a web font which may well look better on MS Windows. Arimo ships with ChromeOS.

It is worth having more research on replacements for free and better alternatives to Arial, because it would seem that it's not hard to do better. While it's unlikely that most MS Windows users will install Arimo, it sends a way better message if we can say "to make your Wikipedia reading experience better, download and install the free font Arimo" than it does to say "to make your Wikipedia experience better, please purchase Helvetica Neue for the low low price of $29.95". Furthermore, it may be worth it to try out the web font mechanism, and we might even be able to talk Mozilla and/or Google into shipping a free font or two with the browser so as to get some real install penetration with these fonts.

Body font evaluation
Ten fonts were evaluated for use as the body (content) font. Style and technical quality were evaluated in blind tests (the evaluators did not know which fonts they were judging). Appropriate style scores are based on readability, neutrality, and "authority" (does the font look like it conveys reliable information). Technical quality scores are based on how well the fonts rendered combining diacritics, ties, and other "obscure" Unicode features. Installation base scores are based on which operating systems the fonts are installed on by default (based on cursory research on Wikipedia).

Another test done by volunteers aimed to reflect the actual typefaces rendered in different combinations of browsers and platforms under three different scenarios: no typefaces defined, only free typefaces specified, and free & proprietary typefaces defined.