On 5/1/06, Mark Shuttleworth <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Michiel Sikma wrote:
> To give my opinion: I believe that Bitstream Vera Sans is a very
nice font,
> apart from some small kerning problems. Freesans is a more
difficult to read
> font. As designer, my rationale is the structure of the font itself:
> Freesans has a smaller so-called "punch width" (which indicates how
broad
> the letter is; larger broadness increases screen font legibility)
and also a
> smaller "x-height" (the height of the lowercase x symbol in a font;
the
> higher, the more legible a font is on a screen). Good screen fonts
are
> Verdana, Bitstream Vera Sans, Lucida Grande, Myriad, Frutiger. I'd
prefer
> seeing Bitstream in future Ubuntu releases, since it's proven
itself to be a
> pretty good font.
>
> It seems we already ship Bitstream Vera Sans. At least, I have it
in my
> reasonably fresh Dapper install. Do we need to do more than ship it?
> Michael, is there a wiki document anywhere which outlines the font
strategy
> for dapper in terms of what is installed by default, and what is
used in
> Gnome, KDE, Firefox, etc? Together with the configs per language?
>
> Mark
There's currently 22 fonts packages installed with (x)ubuntu-desktop
(http://packages.ubuntu.com/dapper/base/ubuntu-desktop):
* a few large CJK fonts (all CJK or parts), mostly high quality:
arphic, mincho, baekmuk
* arabiceyes with _38_ fonts
* indic fonts: malayam, bengali, gujarati, devanagari, kannada, oriya,
punjabi, tamil, telegu
* lao
* thai
* latin: bitstream, dejavu (with greek and cyrillic partially hinted
and unhinted arabic), mgopen
* greek: dejavu, mgopen
* cyrillic: dejavu (some characters have Serbian style)
* pan-unicode: freefont
kubuntu-desktop also depends on ttf-gentium which is very nice serif
font for latin/greek/cyrillic.
edubuntu-desktop does not depend on ttf-arphic-*
It is arguable whether that many fonts should be installed by default.
Most of the non Latin script fonts include basic latin characters
similar to Helvetica, Arial or FreeSans, some to Bitstream Vera fonts
and others to Times New Roman.
From a Latin script based point of view it is rather annoying to have
100+ fonts with only a few actually different. From another script
based point of view the same argument is still relevant since many
fonts are just like the next except for the pertinent script fonts.
Some packages should be split up, if not all that contain more than
one typeface.
Those that should be split up are those that include decorative fonts
or experimental fonts, i.e. arabeyes and dejavu, maybe others I don't
know.
All packages could also be split up so only the bare minimum for each
script is installed by default, while exta packages are available,
installed with language support or by the user's choice.
On the long run font management needs to be improved. The only way to
have many fonts installed and to be able to cope with it would be to
have fonts organized by script/language supported and a customizable
list of favorite fonts across all apps à la file selector. The user
should also be able to specify what font to use per script/language so
fonts with more than one script that have hight priority in fontconfig
don't collide with the user's preference.
Cheers,
Denis Moyogo Jacquerye
