[Kimchi-devel] New-UI Helvetica Font

Wed Aug 26 14:51:32 UTC 2015

Hello team,

I had some discussions on the fonts and am interested in the current 
status. 

Some background for non-UI persons:

First we need to distinguish between the server and the client.

The server contains the Kimchi/Ginger-webserver and the 
Kimchi/Ginger-installation with functional and UI code.
The client contains a browser instance connected to the 
Kimchi/Ginger-webserver and displays the UI. 

Per default the browser uses fonts which are installed on the client. Five 
generic fonts are available on each client operating system and are used 
as a default. 
In CSS/HTML you specify a list of fonts starting with the most preferred 
one and ending with a generic one (default).

You can also provide fonts via the server. This ensures that your 
preferred font is available at the client. Such fonts are part of the 
Kimchi/Ginger-installation on the server (no additional rpm).

My opinion on the font discussion:

1) Icon Font Awesome 
   This font is very useful as it provides a lot of scalable icons. We 
should use/package this font

2) Fonts like "Open Sans" and/or TeXGyreHeros as open source replacement 
for "Helvetica Neue"
   The sizes of graphical elements vary much more depending on the 
language than on the font. Our layout must be flexible enough to support 
this.
   My recommendation is to use fonts which are already installed on the 
client.

Kind regards
Jan

From:   Samuel Henrique De Oliveira Guimaraes 
<samuel.guimaraes at eldorado.org.br>
To:     Kevin Zander <klzander at linux.vnet.ibm.com>, Aline Manera 
<alinefm at linux.vnet.ibm.com>, "kimchi-devel at ovirt.org" 
<kimchi-devel at ovirt.org>, "donspang at us.ibm.com" <donspang at us.ibm.com>
Date:   08/11/2015 07:13 PM
Subject:        Re: [Kimchi-devel] New-UI Helvetica Font
Sent by:        kimchi-devel-bounces at ovirt.org

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>; kimchi-devel at ovirt.org; 
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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