Droid Sans

[William Jon McCann]

Hey,

On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 1:41 PM, Matthias Clasen <mclasen at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-04-28 at 23:16 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
>> Jeremy Perry (jeremy.perry at 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-on-screen-every-pixel-counts/
>> > - 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.
>
> So, based on those screenshots, and based on what people have commented
> on here, it seems that 2) is not nearly as big of a problem in practice
> than I was assuming. So, that leaves us with finding a brave fontconfig
> hacker to get the Japanse<>Droid issue under control, then we have the
> major technical issues solved.
>
> That still leaves the question if we want to do this switch like any
> other UI tweak, or tie it to the coming major UX change, the shell.
> Peoplea are very sensitive to font changes, so it might be easier to
> swallow it if comes coupled with an entirely new UX...

Right.  I'd like to see us package and ship Droid on the media for F13
but consider making it default in F14.

Jon