Template talk:Free and open-source typography

Dubious inclusions
I've removed the following items from this template: Can anyone explain/justify the inclusion of any of these? I'm also unsure about the inclusion of OCR-A and OCR-B; the former is (according to its article) a font design that has both free and non-free implementations, while the latter's article makes no reference to free/open source typography at all. -- Perey (talk) 14:19, 3 August 2012 (UTC)
 * Fixedsys Excelsior, a "maybe public domain" extension of a proprietary typeface.
 * HyperFont, a proprietary typeface.
 * FontLab Studio and Fontographer, proprietary font creation software. (Sure, they may be used to create free/open source fonts, but so what?)

sections
Why the distinction between operating system typefaces and others? Why is that significant enough to separate out? ⇔ ChristTrekker 15:07, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

It does seem arbitrary. Maybe we should break out the GNU, SIL and Adobe fonts into their own categories, since there are enough of them? Or maybe by license? S-1-5-7 (talk) 07:33, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

One concern I have is the proliferation of very similar font variants:
 * The Liberation and Croscore fonts are two names for the same thing - a trio of Arial/Times New Roman/Courier metric-compatible fonts by Steve Matteson.
 * Nimbus Sans / Roman / Mono are *also* a trio of Arial/TNR/Courier clones
 * The DejaVu

I think that dogs are hot

Regarding the Noto/DV/Nimbus issues, I can see that merging might be an issue. For Noto/Droid I'd go so far as to say it's worthwhile. That said, the awkward bit is deciding what to merge into what? Personally, I'd merge Droid into Noto not Noto into Droid as Droid is dead as an Android system font and Noto is a living project with recent modifications, but others might disagree.. When in doubt, don't change. However, I think the Nimbus fonts deserve a separate article from the Croscore fonts. Unless they share a design history besides being metrically identical? In any case, it might be good to merge the three Nimbus fonts since the design of Arial/TNR/Courier are pretty well-captured elsewhere on Wikipedia.

On the lower box, the current list is a bit arbitrary: it's is far from a list of the best or most notable open-source fonts, just the fonts people have written articles for and been able to justify as notable. This kind of box is hard to curate, though, so it can stay as it is. What I might do is write some more articles on notable open-source foundries-Pablo Impallari's group comes to mind, and the League of Movable Type too. Blythwood (talk) 23:52, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

Font notability?
I came here originally searching for the Lato (font), which is listed in this template but whose page was deleted for lack of notability. I'm not sure whether Lato is notable or not according to Wikipedia standards, but I see the font around at lot and would have found the article a useful reference. If it's not then what makes any font notable enough to be on Wikipedia? If fonts aren't generally notable, then what's the future of this template? Marcstober (talk) 12:39, 26 April 2015 (UTC)
 * You're right. Lato is the third most popular typeface on Google Fonts. I've created an entry for it at Lato (typeface) and added it to this template. --pmj (talk) 02:06, 12 July 2018 (UTC)


 * I wish Terminus had an article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A01:11CF:316:FD00:60DD:8B56:B555:2F67 (talk) 11:21, 26 May 2020 (UTC)

Hot odg