On Wed, 2010-04-28 at 23:16 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Jeremy Perry (jeremy.perry(a)redhat.com) said:
> > 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
>
> OK. I did some quick comparisons which can be seen at:
>
>
http://notting.fedorapeople.org/font-tests/
>
> if people are interested.
Disclaimer: I only looked at the English images.
Droid is certainly thinner, which is probably worthwhile, but I'm not
sure it's uniformly better. The left vertical stroke in H in "Hardware"
looks like a hinting failure. That's sort of a general observation
though, vertical strokes don't look like they have consistent thickness,
Vertical strokes look really bad on u/n/h/m. Look at Sound,
Authentication, or Mouse; the tall vertical stroke on the left of the
'h' is 2x as wide as the short vertical stroke on the right.
It looks really tacky. Like a badly scaled down image.
Dan