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(a)redhat.com> wrote:
> Matthias Clasen (mclasen(a)redhat.com) 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-o...
- 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