[Kimchi-devel] New-UI Helvetica Font

[Samuel Henrique De Oliveira Guimaraes]

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

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