Hi,

RE:
>> 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.

I am not sure Deja Vu is ugly at all. If you reduce the fond size it looks even beautiful.
Maybe it is not well calibrated in relation to the remaining fonts we are accustomed to use.

Regards

P.S. It would be interesting to know what is the font used in printing most of the rare books - collection series, for example.