Re: Suggestion: Use Liberation fonts as default in Firefox 3
by Nicolas Mailhot
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
15 years, 10 months
Re: Suggestion: Use Liberation fonts as default in Firefox 3
by Nicolas Mailhot
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
15 years, 10 months
Re: Suggestion: Use Liberation fonts as default in Firefox 3
by Nicolas Mailhot
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
15 years, 10 months
[ANSWER] Fonts and Fedora spins
by Nicolas Mailhot
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
15 years, 10 months
New Upstream Version: lohit-fonts-2.1.8
by Rahul Bhalerao
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=lohi....
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.
15 years, 10 months
Need help with the needed fonts for the KDE live images
by Sebastian Vahl
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
15 years, 10 months
Re: Live images and fonts
by Nicolas Mailhot
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
15 years, 10 months
VLGothic-fonts fontconfig
by Jens-Ulrik Petersen
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
15 years, 10 months
