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

[Michiel Sikma]

Oh, my apologies, I thought that you were talking about replacing the 
default "sans" font in Ubuntu with Freesans. Freesans is probably good 
enough to include as default font, but not as system-wide font for all 
things such as dialogs, et cetera. The fact that Freesans was in Fedora 
Core 4 was actually one of the reasons I decided not to start using it.

Regards, Michiel

Denis Jacquerye heeft op donderdag, 4 mei 2006 om 14:47 
(Europe/Amsterdam) het volgende geschreven:

> I opened the following bug report to keep track of what might be wrong
> with fonts in Ubuntu
> https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/kubuntu-desktop/+bug/42926
>
> On 5/2/06, Denis Jacquerye <moyogo at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 5/1/06, Mark Shuttleworth <mark at canonical.com> wrote:
>> >  Michiel Sikma wrote:
>> > To give my opinion: I believe that Bitstream Vera Sans is a very 
>> nice font,
>> > apart from some small kerning problems. Freesans is a more 
>> difficult to read
>> > font. As designer, my rationale is the structure of the font itself:
>> > Freesans has a smaller so-called "punch width" (which indicates how 
>> broad
>> > the letter is; larger broadness increases screen font legibility) 
>> and also a
>> > smaller "x-height" (the height of the lowercase x symbol in a font; 
>> the
>> > higher, the more legible a font is on a screen). Good screen fonts 
>> are
>> > Verdana, Bitstream Vera Sans, Lucida Grande, Myriad, Frutiger. I'd 
>> prefer
>> > seeing Bitstream in future Ubuntu releases, since it's proven 
>> itself to be a
>> > pretty good font.
>> >
>> >  It seems we already ship Bitstream Vera Sans. At least, I have it 
>> in my
>> > reasonably fresh Dapper install. Do we need to do more than ship it?
>> > Michael, is there a wiki document anywhere which outlines the font 
>> strategy
>> > for dapper in terms of what is installed by default, and what is 
>> used in
>> > Gnome, KDE, Firefox, etc? Together with the configs per language?
>> >
>> >  Mark
>>
>> There's currently 22 fonts packages installed with (x)ubuntu-desktop
>> (http://packages.ubuntu.com/dapper/base/ubuntu-desktop):
>> * a few large CJK fonts (all CJK or parts), mostly high quality:
>> arphic, mincho, baekmuk
>> * arabiceyes with _38_ fonts
>> * indic fonts: malayam, bengali, gujarati, devanagari, kannada, oriya,
>> punjabi, tamil, telegu
>> * lao
>> * thai
>> * latin: bitstream, dejavu (with greek and cyrillic partially hinted
>> and unhinted arabic), mgopen
>> * greek: dejavu, mgopen
>> * cyrillic: dejavu (some characters have Serbian style)
>> * pan-unicode: freefont
>>
>> kubuntu-desktop also depends on ttf-gentium which is very nice serif
>> font for latin/greek/cyrillic.
>> edubuntu-desktop does not depend on ttf-arphic-*
>>
>> It is arguable whether that many fonts should be installed by default.
>> Most of the non Latin script fonts include basic latin characters
>> similar to Helvetica, Arial or FreeSans, some to Bitstream Vera fonts
>> and others to Times New Roman.
>> From a Latin script based point of view it is rather annoying to have
>> 100+ fonts with only a few actually different. From another script
>> based point of view the same argument is still relevant since many
>> fonts are just like the next except for the pertinent script fonts.
>>
>> Some packages should be split up, if not all that contain more than
>> one typeface.
>> Those that should be split up are those that include decorative fonts
>> or experimental fonts, i.e. arabeyes and dejavu, maybe others I don't
>> know.
>> All packages could also be split up so only the bare minimum for each
>> script is installed by default, while exta packages are available,
>> installed with language support or by the user's choice.
>>
>> On the long run font management needs to be improved. The only way to
>> have many fonts installed and to be able to cope with it would be to
>> have fonts organized by script/language supported and a customizable
>> list of favorite fonts across all apps à la file selector. The user
>> should also be able to specify what font to use per script/language so
>> fonts with more than one script that have hight priority in fontconfig
>> don't collide with the user's preference.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Denis Moyogo Jacquerye
>>
>>
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