Droid Sans

[Martin Sourada]

Hi,

first let me say, I'm not an expert in typography either...

On Wed, 2010-04-28 at 17:16 -0400, Jeremy Perry wrote:
> 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/
Well, "ugly" is very subjective here (apart from cases where there are
obvious rendering glitches, etc.). Just like Times is perfect font for
newspapers, where there are usually many rather thin columns, while it's
a complete waste to use it on literature where wide fonts look much
better or nature sciences texts (where computer modern family of fonts
is clearly one of the best) --- what looks very well on PDA/mobile
phones displays (e.g. Droid) would probably not look as good on wide
screens where you clearly have "space to waste" in horizontal direction
but not in vertical. 

From what I've seen, Deja Vu Sans looks best for me (my personal
opinion, probably also heavily biased by extensive and long usage of
Deja Vu Sans...), but I have to admit I have wide screen (notebook
screen 1280x800), use 9 pt height (98 dpi) and don't have all fonts
available in repos installed...

In overall, my point is that if you'd like to change default font of
fedora desktop, you should do much deeper research than just a handful
of fonts lead by Google Droid which was designed for a rather specific
use... I suppose one release cycle should be just enough time to do
research, evaluation of the proposed variants and making a final
decision. I believe folks at Fonts SIG and Design Team might be
able/willing to help.

Btw. do we have any useful data on where Fedora is used? What are the
usual screen resolutions, screen width/height ratios, DPIs, ...? It
might play some role in the decision with which font to go with.

Just my two cents,
Martin
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