Hi, first let me say, I'm not an expert in typography either... On Wed, 2010-04-28 at 17:16 -0400, Jeremy Perry wrote: > 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/ Well, "ugly" is very subjective here (apart from cases where there are obvious rendering glitches, etc.). Just like Times is perfect font for newspapers, where there are usually many rather thin columns, while it's a complete waste to use it on literature where wide fonts look much better or nature sciences texts (where computer modern family of fonts is clearly one of the best) --- what looks very well on PDA/mobile phones displays (e.g. Droid) would probably not look as good on wide screens where you clearly have "space to waste" in horizontal direction but not in vertical. From what I've seen, Deja Vu Sans looks best for me (my personal opinion, probably also heavily biased by extensive and long usage of Deja Vu Sans...), but I have to admit I have wide screen (notebook screen 1280x800), use 9 pt height (98 dpi) and don't have all fonts available in repos installed... In overall, my point is that if you'd like to change default font of fedora desktop, you should do much deeper research than just a handful of fonts lead by Google Droid which was designed for a rather specific use... I suppose one release cycle should be just enough time to do research, evaluation of the proposed variants and making a final decision. I believe folks at Fonts SIG and Design Team might be able/willing to help. Btw. do we have any useful data on where Fedora is used? What are the usual screen resolutions, screen width/height ratios, DPIs, ...? It might play some role in the decision with which font to go with. Just my two cents, Martin
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