[ubuntu-art] Re-Bringup: FreeSans as default font?

[Frank Schoep]

Hello all,

On Monday 01 May 2006 13:18, Étienne Bersac wrote:
> ...
> For helping seeing the différence with FreeSans, i've made
> screenshots of gnome-terminal and nautilus using both fonts (default
> Sans and FreeSans).
> ...

I've been following the discussion on fonts from the sideline and I wanted to 
voice my opinion on FreeSans: the font looks totally unusable for daily use 
because there is no solid baseline. Especially the lowercase "t", "o", "a" 
and "e" stand out against for instance the lowercase "i", "f", "k" and "r".

To backup my harsh statement I've made a cropped screenshot of the font with 
subpixel and normal antialiasing, zoomed 300%, available here:
http://www.ffnn.nl/media/external/ubuntu/freesans-baseline.png

Observe that the lowercase "o" and "e" characters subtly extend one pixel 
below the stems of the "h" and "n". The whole desktop looks to be a 
mumbo-jumbo of letters randomly jumping around. Worst offender in the 
Applications menu is "Internet" where the "t"'s make the text wave horribly.

Other opinions are welcome of course, but I suggest to not use FreeSans for 
anything, as far as I'm concerned it could be taken out of the distribution 
without any questions asked. Sorry to sound this harsh, but the font would 
definitely be a step backwards for users using only ISO 8859-1 / Latin.

With kind regards,

Frank Schoep