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notofonts / latin-greek-cyrillic

Noto Latin, Greek, Cyrillic
SIL Open Font License 1.1
39 stars 8 forks source link

Clarification: is Serif Display deprecated? #436

Closed DLasher106 closed 1 year ago

DLasher106 commented 1 year ago

I know that Sans Display has been deprecated and tossed in the bin, but is Serif Display also deprecated, or just active-but-quiet?

Noto Serif Display v2.009 is listed under Releases here, and the files are listed on the Dashboard page. However, the files have not been updated since last year, and they are not listed on the Development Builds page (https://notofonts.github.io/latin-greek-cyrillic/).

verdy-p commented 1 year ago

Sans Display and Serif Display were defined for usability, i.e. better readability and easier intergration on UI for use on devices with small displays (most of them mobile). Even if most mobile devices now use HiDPI displays, usability remains a valid issue for many users.

"Display" versions are notably tuned to work well with touch screens, so they will allow scripts with complex glyphs to be rendered at larger sizes, while still allowing to work well in multilingual texts using multiple scripts side by side on the same rows of text (this means notably that Latin/Greek/Cyrillic/Deseret/Cherokee/... may need to have larger default line-heights, to fit well beside other Asian scripts that should also be readable, notably CJK, Myanmar, Tibetan; and that scripts that are generally hard to read at small sizes, like Arabic, may be also using larger glyph heights and widths, or will adapt the metrics of base letters to better fit their upper or lower diacritics).

Non-"Display" styles are best tuned for rendering traditional monolingual documents, notably for printing, or for isolated contexts (e.g. titling). They may be used on the web, but webbrowsers on mobile devices would prefer using Display versions, even if when printing pages they could use non-Display versions (with more compact and mor tradidional metrics), possibly by using user preferences for remapping these fonts, which means a different page layout (reflowing the document tp be printed is usually needed in all cases, depending on the size of the target printed medium and resolution or color capabilities and ink types). But web authors may tuned themselves the stylesheets for such adaptation to other output devices.

But for textual captions on videos to transcribe the audio content, or to describe the scenes, "Display" versions are best suited and better fit the accessbility requirements. I would not call this need, or the use on small mobile devices or in mulingual contexts, for any deprecation. We have never needed these less than today.

moyogo commented 1 year ago

I know that Sans Display has been deprecated and tossed in the bin, but is Serif Display also deprecated, or just active-but-quiet?

They will not be worked on until further notice. You can consider them to be deprecated.

simoncozens commented 1 year ago

Sans Display and Serif Display were defined for usability

I'm not sure they were, though; that's the problem. The "display" version was not exactly optical size and not exactly contrast, and was a different implementation between serif and sans. It didn't really fit into any of the models of font variation that we support elsewhere. So they need re-thinking, harmonising, and re-drawing.

You can consider them to be deprecated.

To be honest, I think that's a mild way to describe it.