Summary/Minutes from today's FESCo Meeting (2012-07-23)

[Björn Persson]

onsdagen den 25 juli 2012 16:38:33 skrev  Nicolas Mailhot:
> Le Mer 25 juillet 2012 16:21, Tomasz Torcz a écrit :
> >   Which is which?  There are some example here:
> > http://tagoh.fedorapeople.org/tmp/hints/
> > 
> >  *-autohint variants are clearly blurred, while -*hintfull are eligible.
> 
> And -*hintfull variants clearly show massive distortion and sudden
> thickness jumps when moving from one size to another. So they are not well
> hinted either.

Perhaps I can provide some input here?

Personally I don't see anything I would call "massive distortion" in any of 
those samples. It could be because I'm not all that interested in fonts. I'm 
used to seeing many different glyph variants and I don't care a lot about the 
finer details as long as it's clear which letter is which. I think many users 
are probably like me in that regard. Users don't want to think about the font 
when they are reading a text; they want to think about the information 
contained in the text. The font should convey the information without drawing 
attention to itself.

I hope font designers don't take this to mean that their work is unimportant. 
That's not what I'm saying. Good fonts are very important, but most of the 
time a good font is one that the users don't notice.

Many years ago it would often happen that the line thickness varied so much 
between individual letters that some of the letters looked like they were 
bold. That was quite annoying, but I don't see that in these samples. Maybe 
the w could have been a little thinner in LiberationSans-hintfull.png, sizes 
15 to 17, but that's a minor issue compared to how it was back then.

I strongly dislike the blurry letters in the autohint samples. I lived with 
such blurry letters for some time, and I remember how they affected me. They 
annoyed me and drew my attention away from my reading. I think vertical and 
horizontal lines should always be a whole number of pixels wide. The thickness 
jumps between sizes are unfortunate, but they are an inevitable effect of 
limited screen resolution. I'll choose the thickness jumps over the blurry 
letters without hesitation.

Should we hold a vote to determine how the majority of users like their fonts?

Björn Persson