Hi team,
I noticed that the
new-ui design pattern for typography specifies Helvetica
Neue family in four different styles. This font family is
shipped with the latest versions of Mac OS X and iOS but it
is not available for free on Windows and Linux
distributions.
I believe this might
conflict with Kimchi license. Even if we buy or rent a
webfont license we can’t distribute the TTF, EOT, WOFF and
SVG files in our repositories. I think that we can’t even
use a webfont license in this case (pointing to a remote
location or service like Adobe Typekit or MyFonts) because
most font-licensing services are charging based on pre-paid
pageviews.
Usually for web apps,
mobile web apps and cloud based services we have to buy a
server license to store the webfont files within our
servers, but since Kimchi is an open-source project that
anyone can check out and run, every kimchi instance would
have to buy their own font license.
We can set Helvetica as
the default font-family in the CSS and if the user doesn’t
have this font installed the browser will load the next
available font (Arial or any other Sans-Serif) but since
each font has different sizes, some elements may not fit in
the screen exactly like they were seen in the mockups. Also,
the UI specs recommends Helvetica Neue in 5 different styles
(Light, Roman, Regular, Medium and Bold), most system fonts
only have 3. We don’t have something like “Arial Light” for
instance.
My suggestion is that we
replace Helvetica Neue for Open Sans because it covers all
the style specifications and it is licensed under Apache
2.0. Any thoughts?
Thanks,
Samuel Guimarães