Droid Sans

[William Jon McCann]

Hey,

On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 4:21 PM, Bill Nottingham <notting at redhat.com> wrote:
> Matthias Clasen (mclasen at redhat.com) said:
>> On Wed, 2010-04-28 at 16:01 -0400, William Jon McCann wrote:
>> > Hey,
>> >
>> > I think we want to consider switching to Droid Sans for the default
>> > font.  At the very least I want it included on the install/live media.
>> >  What do we need to do to make this happen?
>> >
>> > I seem to recall there were some technical reasons why we weren't able
>> > to make this happen for F12.
>>
>> The two main issues are:
>>
>> 1) Some technical problem with the fontconfig configuration causes
>> Japanese desktops to break if Droid is even installed.
>>
>> 2) Coverage: Droid may be ok for the US, and asian languages have their
>> entirely separate fonts anyway, but Dejavu is much better in covering
>> WGL and Eastern Europe. Droid will probably give users there a miserable
>> mixture of fonts
>
> Given #2, especially... what is better about Droid Sans that makes it
> a better option over DejaVu?

Firstly, I should have been more clear that I would like to see Droid
Sans be considered for the default UI font - not document font.

I am not a typography expert.  For my part, I think Droid looks a lot
better and it was designed from the start to be a UI font, where
DejaVu was not.
My designer colleagues in Fedora and GNOME are much more knowledgeable
about this and I've asked them to chime in with some details.

As for the fallback stuff  http://www.droidfonts.com/droidfonts/about/
talks a bit about that and I wonder how Android is able to use these
fonts and be used by I'd guess at least an order of magnitude more
people than Fedora.

For comparison here some UI fonts:
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segoe
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucida_Grande
 * http://typophile.com/node/58935
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droid_%28font%29

Jon