Alternative Font

[jdittrich]

The mockups should look provisional (useful for design communication and »politics«, since it says: »we may change it and it is far from finished«): So a »sketchy« font should be used, and Comic Sans is a good choice in this regard: It looks hand drawn, is wide spread and readable.

However, Comic Sans is not Open Source, so if someone knows a font with the same metrics (means, if you change between this font and comic sans, the length of lines stays the same) we can use this other font as a preferred alternative. (As an addition, it would allow to skip annoying discussions about Comic Sans being inherently bad)

[simonv3]

Agreed with this. A Comic Sans-like font serves a good purpose of "this is temporary!"

[jdittrich]

Sadly, Comic Neue and Purisa have rather different metrics than comic sans.
Most other options (TSCu_Comic etc.) I found have only one style and I suppose at least having a normal and a bold font would be good.

[simonv3]

Is it such a big deal if Comic Neue is narrower? Would we just re-align things?

[jdittrich]

If the designer used a narrow font and the user only has a wider one installed one may get unintended line breaks and thus twice-as-high elements and/or elements may not align properly anymore. So for now, I think it may do harm.

But: If we would have some 10+ Mockups from different users we could just iterate through some fonts with all of them and see how bad it is and decide data-based :-)

[simonv3]

We could use @font-face to mitigate that? It adds some download to the page, but it would ensure that everyone sees the same font.

[jdittrich]

I'm sort of torn. In contrast to ComicSansMS, ComicNeue is

• Pro: Open Source Font
• Contra: Not wide spread, almost anyone will need to install/download it

But if we think it's worth it:

• yes, that would be an idea – so if the user has the font installed, it just works, otherwise it is downloaded?
• And if yes, can we just add ComicNeue to the repo according to it's license?

[paulproteus]

FWIW I'm +0 to ​consistency in a tool like this. Voting +0 not +1 since I'm just someone wandering by, but I also want to say that I do love this project!