[Kimchi-devel] New-UI Helvetica Font

Tue Aug 11 17:12:44 UTC 2015

I thought that since we are packaging Font-Awesome, Elusive and other font files as icons it was ok to distribute Open Sans with Kimchi. I proposed moving to an open source and redistributable font family instead of a font stack because a text with Arial Unicode on Windows doesn’t fill the same space in pixels as a text with Helvetica Neue on OS X and iOS. Open Sans was an alternative because it has the same variations as Helvetica Neue and almost the same size (I mean letter spacing / tracking, kerning, body width, leading  and height), we wouldn’t have “condensed” styles in one system and plain and regular bold and normal text in other systems.

Samuel

From: Kevin Zander [mailto:klzander at linux.vnet.ibm.com]
Sent: terça-feira, 11 de agosto de 2015 13:31
To: Aline Manera <alinefm at linux.vnet.ibm.com>; Samuel Henrique De Oliveira Guimaraes <samuel.guimaraes at eldorado.org.br>; kimchi-devel at ovirt.org; donspang at us.ibm.com
Subject: Re: [Kimchi-devel] New-UI Helvetica Font

On Tue, 2015-08-11 at 12:01 -0300, Aline Manera wrote:

On 10/08/2015 09:58, Samuel Henrique De Oliveira Guimaraes wrote:
Hi team,

I’m sending some screenshots to compare different fonts so we can decide if we are going to replace Helvetica Neue for Open Sans and/or TeXGyreHeros.
I also found out that Open Sans doesn’t have all the character glyphs for simplified and traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages (wok_current.png file, you can see that these texts have jagged edges). The equivalent font for these languages is called Noto Sans CJK which is licensed under SIL Open Font License (OFL). The downside is that Noto Sans is very heavy (~88MB each language set) so we would have to figure a way to load these font files only when the user has changed the locale in the front-end.

OH! Wait... The idea is to use an open source and wide used font, which means, Kimchi will not package any font file.

Isn’t there an open source and wide used font which works with all languages?

http://www.cssfontstack.com/

Which of these has the best unicode support though, I cannot answer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_font#List_of_Unicode_fonts

Thanks,

Samuel Guimaraes

From: Aline Manera [mailto:alinefm at linux.vnet.ibm.com]
Sent: quarta-feira, 5 de agosto de 2015 15:24
To: Samuel Henrique De Oliveira Guimaraes <samuel.guimaraes at eldorado.org.br><mailto:samuel.guimaraes at eldorado.org.br>; kimchi-devel at ovirt.org<mailto:kimchi-devel at ovirt.org>; donspang at us.ibm.com<mailto:donspang at us.ibm.com>
Subject: Re: [Kimchi-devel] New-UI Helvetica Font

On 16/07/2015 13:09, Samuel Henrique De Oliveira Guimaraes wrote:
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.

Hrm... we should build the new UI with responsive web design in mind which means changing the font, font size, resizing the browser or whatever will not impact in the final layout.

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?

Could you provide a screenshot with the Open Sans font so we can see how it will look like?

In first hand, I am OK to change to Open Sans.
I am copying Don who originally designed the new UI with the Helvetica Neue font to check if he has any advice to do.

Thanks,
Samuel Guimarães

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