Fonts for the brand

[quaid]

We need a free/open font for the brand to use in a range of places, including the guidebook output and the website itself.

[tigert]

I think for text content we should use something made for maximum readability, a "boring" font one might say. I guess many tech and study books as well as most online content are using sans-serif ("Arial") fonts while other literature uses serif fonts ("Times New Roman").

So I'd say Open Sans for the text content would make sense, and it would be nice to have a consistent brand across the website, ebook and printed book.

On the other hand, "Crimson Pro" probably looks great printed (headline here is Montserrat):

So I am a bit torn, as this would be lovely in a book, it looks like it's inviting to a good story. But it might be a bit strange in a web or ebook, as you might be reading it from a lower resolution screen, and serif typefaces benefit from higher resolution. Not everyone in the world and in our audience has an iPad Pro.

Here's Open Sans with Montserrat titles:

Another good sans serif is Source Sans Pro made by Adobe, for user interfaces, it also works for text content I think:

[tigert]

I'd go with Open Sans for the text content.

Did you notice that I removed all the numbering from the headlines? If those are needed for some reaoson I overlooked, we should display them in a less prominent way to keep the book nicer to read.

[tigert]

I'd leave colors out of the main text, lets use color for any extra stuff if needed.

If the book is to be printed black and white, any converted-to-grayscale graphics / elements will look silly, I think they will look way more powerful and clear if we design them to work in single color. For the web we can use color, but it would be nice to have similarly done symbolic images that also work great in black, and just drop the color for print.

[shaunix]

I'm not fond of Source Sans Pro for running text. Too dense, and my eyes cross.

As for section numbers, I assumed we wanted them for some cross-reference purposes. I've long-since given up on them for documentation, but OSW isn't documentation. I did play around with moving the section numbers into the left margin, which I think makes them much more readable, and helps the headings stand out.

Unfortunately, Asciidoctor doesn't appear to output the kind of markup I need to do this cleanly.

[tigert]

The margin trick indeed improves the readability and it looks great! Hopefully that can be achieved.

Worst case, could they be moved to the right margin or something? Not sure, but having headings start with a numbering scheme makes it very awkward and distracting to read.

[quaid]

The margin trick indeed improves the readability and it looks great! Hopefully that can be achieved.

Worst case, could they be moved to the right margin or something? Not sure, but having headings start with a numbering scheme makes it very awkward and distracting to read.

We can definitely remove them. I put them in more out of habit, I guess—the cross-referencing thing for PDF/printed but maybe no one does that anyway? Each section does have a predictable href anchor, but it would be nice to find a way to highlight the links for all the sub-sections, including the ones that aren't in the table of contents. Maybe we don't need the numbers, I'm not attached to them, just to being able to reference sections.

For how it looks without the numbers, here are side-by-side builds to compare:

https://www.theopensourceway.org/the_open_source_way-guidebook-2.0.html
https://www.theopensourceway.org/the_open_source_way-guidebook-2.0--no_section_numbering.html

https://www.theopensourceway.org/the_open_source_way-guidebook-2.0.pdf
https://www.theopensourceway.org/the_open_source_way-guidebook-2.0--no_section_numbering.pdf

For the margin variation, we should be able to use the CSS generator to tweak that, if that's the better choice.

[tigert]

Some sites I have seen have a permalink that shows on mouseover on headings, so linking (which I think is important) still works.

Actually it's Github that does that!

On the rendered Markdown files: https://github.com/theopensourceway/guidebook/blob/master/README.md