Dear All,

Below is a message from Nicolas Mailhot who's asking for testing on DejaVu.
Please kindly have a look.

Regards,
Chester

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Hi,

I'm calling for a round of testing/feedback on DejaVu
(http://dejavu.sf.net/). You don't need any technical background to
provide it. Just read this message.

DejaVu is the most popular FOSS derivative of Bitstream Vera. DejaVu is
currently consolidating the Vera forks initiated after it become clear
Vera would not be updated or fixed any time soon
(http://www.gnome.org/fonts/ lists the last Vera release time as April
16, 2003).

The main DejaVu aims are :
1. Quality (fix all the problems of existing Vera glyphs)
2. Coverage (extend Vera beyond its Latin-9 limits: Cyrillic, Greek,
Armenian, Arabic, etc - cf attached coverage table)

Some DejaVu screenshots are available on
http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/gtk-frontend/screenshots/20060621_dejavu2.7_exp/

DejaVu is already extensively used by Debian, Ubuntu and Suse to name
some major Linux distributions.

It's being proposed as the Fedora Core 6 default font.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=170218
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2006-June/msg00292.html

Two kinds of objections have been raised so far:

1. DejaVu big coverage and use of advanced OpenType features is
stressing the font infrastructure. The current problems were best
described by Ben Laenen here:
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=18518811

-> I ask you not to bring these issues up again unless
a. you wish to work with the pango team on locl,
b. help push
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/fontconfig/2006-June/002332.html
c. or work on BASE OpenType support.

None of the issues are DejaVu specific, they all need fixing regardless
of DejaVu Fedora Core inclusion, and while DejaVu could use the fixes
it's not faring worse than any other complex font (like popular
Microsoft fonts) without them now.

2. Some people feel this big coverage was attained by sacrificing
quality. This was never the project intent. To help put this issue to
rest I ask everyone interested in crisp fonts on FOSS Desktops to:

a. Install DejaVu (yum install dejavu-fonts dejavu-fonts-experimental
dejavu-fonts-makedefault if you have the Fedora Extra repositories
configured, direct download from
http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Download otherwise)

b. Try it in your usual apps and report any problem you find on
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=DejaVu
Problems may include:
- bad rendering in some sizes or apps
- ugly, difficult to read or missing glyphs
- bad glyph or accent spacing

If you just wish to report the font is great I'm sure the designers
would appreciate a mail to
http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Dejavu-fonts_mailing_list 

To help evaluate your reports please indicate your cultural background
as remarks from native speakers or professional typesetters obviously
weight more than someone commenting on foreign language rendering.
Screenshots exhibiting problems help a lot.

Reports from native speakers of non western langages would be especially
appreciated (Arabic, Armenian...)

Lastly if you don't want to bother with subscribing to the dejavu
mailing list or create a bugzilla account just send me your reports by
mail and I'll dispatch them wherever needed.

This message is being sent to Fedora and DejaVu related English mailing
lists. I do not personally follow all of them so do not forget to CC me
in your answers. Also, since I realise DejaVu support is weakest for
non-western langages, and non-western users often do not read English
lists, I'd appreciate if the various local Fedora communities translated
this message, and forwarded us a translation of their user answers.

Thank you for reading this long message and happy testing

Regards,

--
Nicolas Mailhot
Fedora Extras DejaVu maintainer
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