On Wed, 2010-04-28 at 23:16 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
Jeremy Perry (jeremy.perry(a)redhat.com) said:
> Here is a quick rundown.
>
> Things I know or are my opinions as a designer:
> - Deja Vu Sans is a very vide font, and in many cases causes "ugly" ui
because of the amount of space it consumes. Screen space is at a premium and this font
makes the issue worse by being one of the widest out there. This is a big pain point in
places like dialogs and skinny window titles.
> - Deja Vu Sans is known to be tricky to render on screen - some letters just have
awkward spacing and widths no matter what you do (bowls on d's seem compressed, etc).
I blogged about this as it relates to Fedora:
http://blogs.fedoraproject.org/wp/jperry/2009/10/30/when-rendering-text-o...
> - it looks old - compare it to any other modern UI.
> - The bold is really quite bad and amplifies the issues above.
>
> Things I dont know as fact but suspect about Deja Vu Sans
> - Wasn't designed for UI use specifically. UI fonts are not made for documents,
or vice versa.
> - Hasn't been as rigorously crafted and tweaked by fontographers for best
fitting and spacing
OK. I did some quick comparisons which can be seen at:
http://notting.fedorapeople.org/font-tests/
if people are interested.
Disclaimer: I only looked at the English images.
Droid is certainly thinner, which is probably worthwhile, but I'm not
sure it's uniformly better. The left vertical stroke in H in "Hardware"
looks like a hinting failure. That's sort of a general observation
though, vertical strokes don't look like they have consistent thickness,
and not for any apparent reason. Compare "Preferred". Might be
something hinting settings would help? But man do I wish we'd pick a
setting for that and stick with it.
The I in "Internet" and "VoIP" is really jarring; I appreciate that
it's
capped to distinguish it from 'l', but I feel like either the caps
should be smaller or the right kerning should be looser.
On the plus side, I really like the /, and the 'wo' kerning is better.
- ajax