fonts January 2008

fonts@lists.fedoraproject.org

5 participants
10 discussions

Re: Suggestion: Use Liberation fonts as default in Firefox 3
by Nicolas Mailhot 29 Jan '08

29 Jan '08

Le Mar 29 janvier 2008 15:22, Martin Sourada a écrit : > Btw. the best fonts I've seen so far are the TeX fonts (computer > modern family), BTW (2) the Computer Modern Unicode OTF-isation of the TEX fonts is on the fonts SIG wishlist, so interested packagers are welcome (requires checking upstream conversion scripts work on Fedora TEX and putting them in a spec wrapper) => http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/Fonts/Triaging/Pipeline#head-0c095bcbdcc… Though they are a bit too gracile to work well on current computer screesn (but good as print fonts) -- Nicolas Mailhot

1 0

Re: Suggestion: Use Liberation fonts as default in Firefox 3
by Nicolas Mailhot 29 Jan '08

29 Jan '08

Le Mar 29 janvier 2008 07:24, Felix Miata a écrit : > Regardless about legal ramifications and distro preferences about the > best fonts to use on the desktop, We can't disregard those. > if it means anything at all to have web browsers > render pages designed by authors designing exclusively on Windows to > look as much as possible on Linux like they do on Windows, That's a big if. We don't emulate windows windows widget style and size in Firefox, and Firefox 3 new full page zooming means there will be huge differences between our rendering and the rendering of most windows browsers even if we had the very same fonts with the very same font rendering libs (which we don't and can't). > the priority fallbacks should be to whatever GPL > fonts most closely match Times New Roman for serif, As was already explained Times New Roman metrics are terrible for screen viewing, because it was designed for very different use. > Arial for sans-serif, Liberation Sans is certainly the best of the lot and someone could make a case for it¹. Though if this case was only "do like Windows" it would open a huge can of worms because Arial is not the default Sans Serif for every script, we don't have clones of all the other defaults, and the rules we follow to match scripts and fonts are not the same as on this platform > and Courier New for monospace. Courier New is so bad none of the clones even tried to emulate its style. And discussing Monospace metrics when we don't even use a sensible Monospace size baseline size strikes me as deeply futile. Lastly we do use the Liberation family when the site author explicitely asks for Arial, Times New Roman or Courier New. For other fonts to be used the site author has to declare its design does not care about the particular font used to render it. ¹ But likewise DejaVu Sans is the best of the DejaVu lot which only underlines the utter stupidity of having Serif the browser default. -- Nicolas Mailhot

2 2

Re: Suggestion: Use Liberation fonts as default in Firefox 3
by Nicolas Mailhot 28 Jan '08

28 Jan '08

Le Lun 28 janvier 2008 17:01, Felix Miata a écrit : > On 2008/01/28 16:13 (GMT+0100) Nicolas Mailhot apparently typed: >> I'm afraid that "looking better" is largely subjective when talking >> about fonts. > > If the goal in selecting particular default Firefox fonts is You're redefining the question > to match the ubiquitous platform's font metrics The ubiquitous platform fonts engine is very different from our font engine and does not give the same result with the same fonts, let alone clones (there are studies on the net about this, and there are legal reasons it is so). The ubiquitous platform's fonts were Arial, then Verdana, then something else again in Vista. And that's ignoring differences between ubiquitous platform on different locales. Which particular version of the ubiquitous platform do you want us to emulate for what locale and why will it achieve the "looking better" goal of the original poster? > so that web pages viewed in Firefox > on > Fedora look as much as possible like the very same pages viewed in > Firefox on > doz, then Liberation does a far better job than DejaVu, as that was > the > precise goal of the Liberation Fonts project. If you redefine the goal as looking like Arial, yes Liberation looks more like Arial (in latin). That's about the only hard fact everyone agrees on. Web sites authors that specify Arial or TNR will get Liberation now. Only sites that specify the platform default in their CSS rules will get the platform default. Given that the biggest factor in font appreciation is the exposure one had to this particular font having the browser default be the same as the platform default other apps use makes a lot of sense (even if this platform default is not the same as another platform default). Is Liberation a better font? Will users be better served by a different font default in the browser than in the UI? If not, do we gain more by changing the general UI font than we lose? On what locales? Who will extend which font long term? These are all the questions that need to be considered before hastily making changes > http://www.press.redhat.com/2007/05/09/liberation-fonts/ All press releases have an hot air component, Redhat press releases like others (IIRC this particular PR states Liberation will replace every common FLOSS font out there). Many people have stated that Linux was aimed at world domination. Is it ready for world domination yet? >> So the only thing you've proved is you're used to a style similar to >> Liberation Sans, probably Arial. > > I believed he proved the goal of the Liberation project was achieved. > Liberation Sans is the GPL metric equivalent of Arial. So what? > DejaVu Sans is an excellent substitute for Verdana, but the doz > default in Firefox is Arial, not Verdana. Unfortunately, any close look at Firefox font defaults reveals they're a pile of historic crap so that's not a particularly strong endorsement. The Mozilla foundation has turned a blind eye to font problems for years and its browser settings reflect this fact. It is sad to say that Microsoft did more for free fonts with its proprietary Core Web Fonts initiative than Mozilla ever did. Unfortunately for us Microsoft has moved to the next stage and we've got no clones for its new fonts so targetting core fonts is a dead end. Better to create our own solid font set than continue chasing the Microsoft tail indefinitely - it has the financial means to move way faster than us on the font creation front anyway. Also fontconfig substitution means the same defaults will have vastly different effects on Linux than on Windows. -- Nicolas Mailhot

1 0

Re: Suggestion: Use Liberation fonts as default in Firefox 3
by Nicolas Mailhot 28 Jan '08

28 Jan '08

Le Lun 28 janvier 2008 15:38, Mark a écrit : > I have Firefox 3 now on Fedora rawhide and i really disliked the > default fonts That happens > so i played a little with it till i got acceptable > results. Thanksfully our font selection is large enough you can find alternatives (at least for latin) now > As you can see in [2] is that the fonts are looking just better. No we can't. I'm afraid that "looking better" is largely subjective when talking about fonts. In particular people exhibit a huge bias in favour of whatever font style they're used to. Take any decent modern font, force a user to use it exclusively for a month, and he'll systematically prefer it afterwards in tests. (hey, some people even ended up liking Luxi *shudder*) So the only thing you've proved is you're used to a style similar to Liberation Sans, probably Arial. Had you spent the time to accustom yourself to Fedora defaults you'd be finding Liberation Sans terrible. Given that Liberation and DejaVu are about similar quality-wise, and some people will hate one and others the reverse, other considerations like encoding coverage and upstream reactiveness prevail, and right now DejaVu wins those. P.S. Though you've still kept Serif as default Firefox family, which *is* an ass-backwards Firefox default we should change, since current screens do not have enough resolution to display satisfying Serif fonts. P.P.S. Likewise Mozilla developpers decided at some time monospace should be scaled down for no particular good reason, and site authors are still fighting this error back with CSS hacks P.P.P.S. Also your screenshot exhibits the fugly color fringing of subpixel hinting. It may have been your misguided choice, or the effect of rawhide currently ignoring user settings to use grayscale only. In any way it's not the fonts fault. Regards, -- Nicolas Mailhot

1 0

[ANSWER] Fonts and Fedora spins
by Nicolas Mailhot 25 Jan '08

25 Jan '08

Hi, To all the Fedora spin maintainers out there, please note the following: 1. The main fonts group was changed from base-x to fonts at Fedora 8 time. 2. This change may not have been obvious then because font packages were moved progressively, but it is pretty effective now. 3. Current fonts comps organisation is described in http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/Fonts/Packaging/Policy (as reviewed by FESCO) Basically - distro-wide modern fonts are in the fonts group - distro-wide legacy fonts are in legacy-fonts - script-specific fonts are in the corresponding localization groups There are still some fonts leftovers in base-x that no one dared nuke yet, but they're only used by non-fontconfig legacy apps. Therefore if you only include base-x in your spin as in pre-Fedora 8 times your font selection is going to be underwhelming Regards, -- Nicolas Mailhot

1 0

New Upstream Version: lohit-fonts-2.1.8
by Rahul Bhalerao 25 Jan '08

25 Jan '08

Hi everyone, JFYI, today I released a new version of lohit-fonts, both upstream and fedora rawhide. The upstream tarball is available at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Lohit?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=lohit-…. It contains bug fixes for Malayalam and Assamese/Bengali fonts. More details of the bug fixes can be found at http://bugzilla.redhat.com on following bug reports: - Bug 192812: [ml_IN]GPOS issues in new Malayalam font - Bug 402321: [ml_IN} Wrong combinations used for the conjunct 'ന്പ' - Bug 402331: [ml_IN] Wrong combinations used for conjunct 'ന്<200d>റ' - Bug 424701: [ml_IN] words are shown joined (very low space shown on screen) - Bug 429526: [ml_IN]: Removal of a glyph from font file - Bug 247233: Additional special character rendering for assamese [as-IN] and bengali [bn-IN] Thanks, Rahul Bhalerao.

1 0

Need help with the needed fonts for the KDE live images
by Sebastian Vahl 24 Jan '08

24 Jan '08

Hi. I need some help with the needed fonts for the KDE live images. Since F8 @fonts seems to has changed a bit and so I'm missing some former installed fonts. The kde live images are not using any language groups due to space limitations but they should still be usuable for most of the different languages. This list is pulled in automatically: bitmap-fonts ghostscript-fonts urw-fonts xorg-x11-fonts-100dpi xorg-x11-fonts-ISO8859-1-100dpi xorg-x11-fonts-misc xorg-x11-fonts-Type1 These fonts were installed in my former rawhide/f9 images and also on f8: baekmuk-ttf-fonts-common baekmuk-ttf-fonts-gulim cjkunifonts-uming dejavu-lgc-fonts jomolhari-fonts kacst-fonts liberation-fonts lohit-fonts-bengali lohit-fonts-gujarati lohit-fonts-hindi lohit-fonts-kannada lohit-fonts-oriya lohit-fonts-punjabi lohit-fonts-tamil lohit-fonts-telugu paktype-fonts sazanami-fonts-gothic For the moment I've added them manually. But my question here is: Are all of them needed or are some still missing? Sebastian

2 1

Re: Live images and fonts
by Nicolas Mailhot 24 Jan '08

24 Jan '08

Le jeudi 24 janvier 2008 à 21:09 +0100, Sebastian Vahl a écrit : > Am Thu, 24 Jan 2008 09:30:40 +0100 (CET) > > I know next to nothing about live images but I confirm that the fedora > > font landscape changed quite a bit since fedora 8 (new fonts, pulled > > fonts, renamed fonts, new defaults) so anything font-related done at > > F8 time probably needs to be revisited now > > That's the point: For F8 I was relying on comps.xml to pull the most > needed fonts in automatically. This was also working 2 weeks ago (for > the kde4 image). But it seems that this has changed after that. That's strange because comps/comps-f9.xml.in in cvs seems perfectly fine to me, and Jens and me have updated it with our font changes regularly. > I've re-included the fonts manually but IMHO I should talk to the fonts > sig what fonts are really needed. The SIG is likely to complain localization groups didn't fill http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/Fonts/Triaging/L10N :p -- Nicolas Mailhot

1 0

VLGothic-fonts fontconfig
by Jens-Ulrik Petersen 17 Jan '08

17 Jan '08

Since we are planning to change the default Japanese font in F9 to VLGothic-fonts, I thought I would post the current fontconfig files here for review and comments. Do they look ok? Thanks, Jens

2 1

Draft on recommendations for Indic rendering - feedback requested
by Rahul Bhalerao 04 Jan '08

04 Jan '08

Hi everyone, I have created a draft on recommendations for Indic rendering. You can find it here: http://rbhalera.fedorapeople.org/Documents/RenderingRecommendations1.html It addresses some of the OpenType, Unicode and fonts related issues. Many of the issues discussed here, have been the source of conflicts for few languages. Thus it was an utter need to provide a detailed analysis like this. I hope the illustrations made there provide some common guidelines. I would like to appeal open source font developers (and layout enigne developers) to start using them as a standard for creating their fonts. There would be certainly a scope for improvement in this. I would like to hear from various communities if they want some of the other left out issues to be also addressed. The draft is open for discussion and feedback. Feedbacks can be sent to rahul.bhalerao(a)redhat.com <http://in.f949.mail.yahoo.com/ym/Compose?To=rahul.bhalerao@redhat.com&YY=27…> or to have a common place for discussion the blog entry at http://rahulpmb.blogspot.com/2008/01/rendering-recommendations-draft.html can also be used. Thanks, Rahul Bhalerao.

1 0

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

fonts January 2008