On Apr 28, 2010, at 5:02 PM, William Jon McCann wrote: > Hey, > > On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 4:21 PM, Bill Nottingham <notting@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> Matthias Clasen (mclasen@xxxxxxxxxx) said: >>> On Wed, 2010-04-28 at 16:01 -0400, William Jon McCann wrote: >>>> Hey, >>>> >>>> I think we want to consider switching to Droid Sans for the default >>>> font. At the very least I want it included on the install/live media. >>>> What do we need to do to make this happen? >>>> >>>> I seem to recall there were some technical reasons why we weren't able >>>> to make this happen for F12. >>> >>> The two main issues are: >>> >>> 1) Some technical problem with the fontconfig configuration causes >>> Japanese desktops to break if Droid is even installed. >>> >>> 2) Coverage: Droid may be ok for the US, and asian languages have their >>> entirely separate fonts anyway, but Dejavu is much better in covering >>> WGL and Eastern Europe. Droid will probably give users there a miserable >>> mixture of fonts >> >> Given #2, especially... what is better about Droid Sans that makes it >> a better option over DejaVu? > > Firstly, I should have been more clear that I would like to see Droid > Sans be considered for the default UI font - not document font. > > I am not a typography expert. For my part, I think Droid looks a lot > better and it was designed from the start to be a UI font, where > DejaVu was not. > My designer colleagues in Fedora and GNOME are much more knowledgeable > about this and I've asked them to chime in with some details. > > As for the fallback stuff http://www.droidfonts.com/droidfonts/about/ > talks a bit about that and I wonder how Android is able to use these > fonts and be used by I'd guess at least an order of magnitude more > people than Fedora. > > For comparison here some UI fonts: > * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segoe > * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucida_Grande > * http://typophile.com/node/58935 > * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droid_%28font%29 > > Jon > Here is a quick rundown. Things I know or are my opinions as a designer: - Deja Vu Sans is a very vide font, and in many cases causes "ugly" ui because of the amount of space it consumes. Screen space is at a premium and this font makes the issue worse by being one of the widest out there. This is a big pain point in places like dialogs and skinny window titles. - Deja Vu Sans is known to be tricky to render on screen - some letters just have awkward spacing and widths no matter what you do (bowls on d's seem compressed, etc). I blogged about this as it relates to Fedora: http://blogs.fedoraproject.org/wp/jperry/2009/10/30/when-rendering-text-on-screen-every-pixel-counts/ - it looks old - compare it to any other modern UI. - The bold is really quite bad and amplifies the issues above. Things I dont know as fact but suspect about Deja Vu Sans - Wasn't designed for UI use specifically. UI fonts are not made for documents, or vice versa. - Hasn't been as rigorously crafted and tweaked by fontographers for best fitting and spacing Jeremy -- desktop mailing list desktop@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
