529841 - update First Run/What's New pages with the officially licensed version of Meta

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(www.mozilla.org :: General, defect)

Description

[John Slater]

I've been talking to FontShop (the creators of Meta) and have licensed an official copy of the Meta web font to use on our First Run and What's New pages. Let's be sure to update these pages with the correct version (which has been sent to Steven via email).

They also made the following request:

“Licensee must ensure, applying reasonable state-of-the-art measures, that other websites not hosted on Licencee's server cannot access the licensed fonts for display (i. e. no cross-site linking allowed).”

Comment 1

[Pascal Chevrel:pascalc (PTO until April 26)]

Does that licence include fonts which support non-English languages?

Comment 2

[John Slater]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Does that licence include fonts which support non-English languages?

It does, yes. We bought the biggest language support package they had available, which should cover almost all of our localizations. I have an email in to the guy at FontShop to see if he can get us an exact list.

But, this should cover most of our localizations. For the ones that don't work, I'd say that reverting back to Georgia is a good alternative.

Comment 3

[John Slater]

Attachment: Meta font overview

I heard back from my Font Shop contact. They don't have the info online, but they sent me the attached pdf that has a list of all the supported languages.

Comment 4

[Steven Garrity [:sgarrity]]

Attachment: Screenshot of Firstrun page in XP (no cleartype) with official (OTF-based) WOFF font

Comment 5

[Steven Garrity [:sgarrity]]

Attachment: Screenshot of Firstrun page in XP (no cleartype) with NON-official (TTF-based) WOFF font

Comment 6

[Steven Garrity [:sgarrity]]

It turns out that the official version of the WOFF MetaWeb font family provided is based on the OTF (open-type) original version of the font, rather than the TTF (true-type) original.

This would generally be a good thing, but it appears that Windows XP (without ClearType enabled does a particularly bad job of rendering the OTF version, and a relatively good job of rendering the TTF version.

Comment 7

[John Slater]

Thanks Steven. I've emailed my FontShop contacts about this...we'll see if they have any advice as to the best way to solve.

Comment 8

[Eigi]

the WOFF MetaWeb font family is based on the TTF version of the fonts. You can check this with the woff2sfnt tool provided by Jonathan Kew.
The hinting of the TTF fonts is optimized for the ClearType renderer, which results in poor display quality if ClearType is turned off.

Comment 9

[Steven Garrity [:sgarrity]]

Attachment: MetaBold-Roman TTF font converted to WOFF

(In reply to comment #8)
> the WOFF MetaWeb font family is based on the TTF version of the fonts. You can
> check this with the woff2sfnt tool provided by Jonathan Kew.
> The hinting of the TTF fonts is optimized for the ClearType renderer, which
> results in poor display quality if ClearType is turned off.

Eigi, I see (using the woff2sfnt tool) that you're right. The MetaWeb family is indeed based on TTF. The woff version we created ourselves (with Kew's other tool, sfnt2woff) was also TTF based, but rendered much better in Windows without ClearType (see this screenshot: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=414090).

Our original WOFF version of MetaBold-Roman is attached here if that helps. Any idea why the difference in rendering between the two if both are TTF-based? Thanks.

Comment 10

[Steven Garrity [:sgarrity]]

Attachment: Screenshot of Firstrun page in XP (no cleartype) with official (ClearType hinted) WOFF font - updated font size

I've bumped the font size on the sub-title ("Thanks for supporting...") and the rendering in non-cleartype settings is probably passable. John, you think this is ok? It'll look great in machines with cleartype enabled (default in vista/7). I think it's good enough.

Comment 11

[Steven Garrity [:sgarrity]]

I've implemented the font size adjustment from comment #10 and added the official fonts in r56914.

Comment 12

[John Slater]

(In reply to comment #10)
> I've bumped the font size on the sub-title ("Thanks for supporting...") and the
> rendering in non-cleartype settings is probably passable. John, you think this
> is ok? It'll look great in machines with cleartype enabled (default in
> vista/7). I think it's good enough.

Yeah, it's not quite perfect but it sounds like it's the best we're going to be able to get for now. Thanks for working to figure this out.

Verifying-