I know that Gnome is using Cantarell as its default font, and it seems that something has changed in Fedora to make Cantarell the default font for all desktops. I heard from the KDE SIG this morning that there is some confusion as to whether that was intended to be a global change, or a change only for the Gnome desktop.
I don't pretend to have a clue when it comes to fonts or the fontconfig stuff -- but I'd like to kick off this discussion so that there is less confusion and that nobody tries to ascribe to malice that which can be explained by miscommunication. Is there someone that understands the change that can fill me in on the missing details? -- Jared Smith Fedora Project Leader
Jared K. Smith (jsmith@fedoraproject.org) said:
I know that Gnome is using Cantarell as its default font, and it seems that something has changed in Fedora to make Cantarell the default font for all desktops. I heard from the KDE SIG this morning that there is some confusion as to whether that was intended to be a global change, or a change only for the Gnome desktop.
I don't pretend to have a clue when it comes to fonts or the fontconfig stuff -- but I'd like to kick off this discussion so that there is less confusion and that nobody tries to ascribe to malice that which can be explained by miscommunication. Is there someone that understands the change that can fill me in on the missing details?
If it has become the default font for all desktops, it's likely due to it becoming the default mapping for Sans in fontconfig. (Whether that was intentional, I don't know.)
Bill
On Tue, 2011-02-15 at 11:23 -0500, Bill Nottingham wrote:
Jared K. Smith (jsmith@fedoraproject.org) said:
I know that Gnome is using Cantarell as its default font, and it seems that something has changed in Fedora to make Cantarell the default font for all desktops. I heard from the KDE SIG this morning that there is some confusion as to whether that was intended to be a global change, or a change only for the Gnome desktop.
I don't pretend to have a clue when it comes to fonts or the fontconfig stuff -- but I'd like to kick off this discussion so that there is less confusion and that nobody tries to ascribe to malice that which can be explained by miscommunication. Is there someone that understands the change that can fill me in on the missing details?
If it has become the default font for all desktops, it's likely due to it becoming the default mapping for Sans in fontconfig. (Whether that was intentional, I don't know.)
Not intentional, afaik. The plan is to set the dconf keys used by gnome for fonts to 'Cantarell' explicitly, so we don't have to rely on the 'Sans' alias. For a while, the Adwaita theme was hardcoding the font to Cantarell, too. But we've since decided to use drop that and use the dconf key. The culprit might be /etc/fonts/conf.d/57-cantarell.conf. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about fontconfig syntax to figure that out on the spot...
On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 02:34:09PM -0500, Matthias Clasen wrote:
The plan is to set the dconf keys used by gnome for fonts to 'Cantarell' explicitly, so we don't have to rely on the 'Sans' alias. For a while, the Adwaita theme was hardcoding the font to Cantarell, too. But we've since decided to use drop that and use the dconf key. The culprit might be /etc/fonts/conf.d/57-cantarell.conf. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about fontconfig syntax to figure that out on the spot...
I assume it's because it sorts first (57-c before 57-d) and so is shoved into the sans-serif list before DejaVu Sans gets sorted. Moving the file to 58- should work around that if that's what is desired. A quick look at the fontconfig source seems to confirm that.
It is a pretty nice font though once you get used to the (fairly) jarring change from Deja Vu Sans. It would be nice if the password blank out circles were bigger/more obvious, though, I think?
--Kyle
On Tue, 2011-02-15 at 14:34 -0500, Matthias Clasen wrote:
On Tue, 2011-02-15 at 11:23 -0500, Bill Nottingham wrote:
Jared K. Smith (jsmith@fedoraproject.org) said:
I know that Gnome is using Cantarell as its default font, and it seems that something has changed in Fedora to make Cantarell the default font for all desktops. I heard from the KDE SIG this morning that there is some confusion as to whether that was intended to be a global change, or a change only for the Gnome desktop.
I don't pretend to have a clue when it comes to fonts or the fontconfig stuff -- but I'd like to kick off this discussion so that there is less confusion and that nobody tries to ascribe to malice that which can be explained by miscommunication. Is there someone that understands the change that can fill me in on the missing details?
If it has become the default font for all desktops, it's likely due to it becoming the default mapping for Sans in fontconfig. (Whether that was intentional, I don't know.)
Not intentional, afaik. The plan is to set the dconf keys used by gnome for fonts to 'Cantarell' explicitly, so we don't have to rely on the 'Sans' alias. For a while, the Adwaita theme was hardcoding the font to Cantarell, too. But we've since decided to use drop that and use the dconf key. The culprit might be /etc/fonts/conf.d/57-cantarell.conf. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about fontconfig syntax to figure that out on the spot...
It's numbered exactly the same as the dejavu-sans file, which doesn't seem right; they should have ordering to prioritize whichever we prefer. I don't know whether fontconfig prefers aliases earlier or later in the list; I think it's earlier, so we'd want dejavu-sans' config file to be numbered lower than cantarell's. I guess right now they go alphabetically, so 57-cantarell gets read before 57-dejavu. Should be pretty easy to test, anyway.
On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 3:09 PM, Adam Williamson awilliam@redhat.com wrote:
It's numbered exactly the same as the dejavu-sans file, which doesn't seem right; they should have ordering to prioritize whichever we prefer. I don't know whether fontconfig prefers aliases earlier or later in the list; I think it's earlier, so we'd want dejavu-sans' config file to be numbered lower than cantarell's. I guess right now they go alphabetically, so 57-cantarell gets read before 57-dejavu. Should be pretty easy to test, anyway.
FWIW, it looks like this is being tracked in bug 676253.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=676253
-- Jared Smith Fedora Project Leader
desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org
-
Adam Williamson -
Bill Nottingham -
Jared K. Smith -
Kyle McMartin -
Matthias Clasen