Hello!
First of all, thank
you for the responses - while there is no absolute consensus, which would
release me from the necessity to make the decision, many good points have been
raised, and the whole picture is now much clearer. Below I will try to summarize
your comments and suggestions, together with my responses.
--Changing the
size
1. A suggestion has
been made to make two parallel sets of fonts: one to keep up with the current
size, and another one to keep up with Windows. Sadly, this is something I can't
do. The praised Windows has three different David fonts (you guessed right
- having three different sizes) and four Miriams. I'm afraid that's too
much. If I'm wrong in my stubbornness - somebody can create that additional
set, and that would be the same except that its maintenance wouldn't be my
headache.
2. There were
numerous suggestions to match somehow automatically between Culmus and Windows
fonts, with regards to both names and size. I'd like to note that, for
example, the font "David" has the same name both here and there, and I believe
this would greatly complicate that automation - especially when we think of
transition both inside (change fonts when importing from Word) and outside
(changing fonts back when exporting to Word). My suggestion is that I change all
font names to include the suffix "CLM", what is quite a good
practice in font production. OOo has its heuristics, which can surely deal
with this, and other Linux application seem to standartize around fontconfig,
which also allows such a change to proceed smoothly. This way one will
always know that "David CLM" is Culmus, "David MF" is Masterfont,
etc.
3. The numerical
size of the Hebrew fonts doesn't seem to have any real basis. In some sources I
have old font sizes for typesetting machines are in millimeters, and this makes
size 12 a monstrous one. In addition, Windows fonts themselves don't adhere to
any standard common height. I prepared two files: http://culmus.sf.net/davidsmall.pdf
and http://culmus.sf.net/davidlarge.pdf,
which both present a text in size 12, which is the default for most
applications. Please take a look at both (or better print them on a paper, if
possible), and decide which one is better. The criterion, that the default font
must look good in standard office correspondence, without need to change, seems
to me very important. I perssonally like the small one, but maybe I
represent a minority.
4. As I already
stressed, if there is a change - it will affect all fonts. In the previous
example I used size reduction of ~16% (size 12 turned to 10, 72 to 60, etc.).
This change will not bring the perfect solution: Culmus fonts will
become *almost* like common Windows (~1-2% larger), and much smaller
(~13-14%) than Guttman's. But unfortunately this is something I can't avoid. It
would be impossible to stick forever to each burp Windows
makes.
--Design
considerations
5. Numerous people
expressed concern about relation between Hebrew and Latin glyphs. I'm going
to make Latin glyphs, whenever present, scale according to the Hebrew
ones. Whoever wishes to create a highly mixed document, will have to either
accept the default Latin letters coming with the chosen Hebrew font, or to
hand-tune each foreign word. The vast majority of users either don't need Latin
letters at all inside Hebrew text, or the default choice will be fine for them.
Having given up the strict correspondence to Windows, it would now be ridiculous
to make each font correspond nicely to its Latin
counterpart.
6. David font is now
too dense - there is little distance between lines. I know that, and intend to
fix - see examples from the 3rd paragraph for the fixed layout. In general, the
rule will be like this: the distance between lines (with ascenders/descenders
and serifs ignored) will be equal to the height of the
letters.
To summarize,
currently I think that changing the names of the fonts (David -> David CLM,
etc.) and reducing the default size (which will become like in http://culmus.sf.net/davidsmall.pdf)
will be a serious and irritating change, but this is the way to solve all
problems once and forever and avoid need of further changes, which would be more
and more difficult as the time passes by.
I would be glad to
hear your comments, and I apologize for being absent during the entire
holidays.
Best
regards,
Maxim.
