On Sun, 2023-09-10 at 11:23 +0800, Paul Wise wrote: > On Sat, 2023-09-09 at 23:08 +0200, Gunnar Hjalmarsson wrote: > > > My personal view is that it is a change in the right direction, and > > I > > have taken a couple of follow-up steps in Debian. There are still > > loose > > ends and more work to be done to achieve a consistent configuration > > in > > this respect. However, before taking further steps, I feel there is > > a > > need to reach out to a broader audience about the change. Hence > > this > > message. Basically I'm asking if this move towards Noto is > > desirable > > and, if so, I plea for relevant input for the completion of the > > transition. > > Personally, I found Noto Mono to be very ugly in comparison to the > DejaVu fonts that I was used to, so my knee-jerk reaction was to > override the fontconfig settings to avoid all of the Noto fonts. > I haven't yet evaluated the non-monospace Noto fonts though. > > Related discussion on the various IRC channels suggested that: > > Noto is meant to be a fallback font (something like unifont but > not using bitmaps) not the default font for all or any languages. > > Noto makes the font selector useless because each alphabet shows up. > Apparently fixing this requires changing the OpenType file format. > > Apparently the Noto meta package installs 700+ MB of font data, > which seems a bit excessive to some folks. > > Some folks are setting explicit fonts in applications they use to > avoid > relying on system defaults and also seeing changes to those defaults. >
I have similar personal feelings. Aesthetic matter differs from person to person. As font can be seen as kind of artwork, can we make a pool for the default font just like our wallpaper? Noto is usually annoying to me. It provides too many "Noto .*" fonts in whatever software which shows you a font selection menu. It is likely that at least 1/3 of the whole fonts menu will be overwhelmed by the Noto .* fonts that I'll never use, even if I only keep fonts-noto-core and fonts-noto-cjk. The number of fonts is overwhelming especially when I frequently change the font in software like libreoffice, inkscape, etc. I usually end up deleting the ttf files that I will never need. Just a negative vote on Noto. Anything else is better.
