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

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2012-07-31 at 22:58 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Akira TAGOH wrote:
> > Well, that's true for proprietary fonts, but not necessarily true for free
> > fonts.
> 
> Our default font set for most languages, DejaVu, ships carefully designed 
> hinting bytecode written specifically for FreeType's bytecode interpreter, 
> and its designers explicitly ask for it to be used rather than the 
> autohinter. (Some people dislike the font's look with the hinting, but it is 
> how the designers intended it to look.)

It seems like we're really just debating between:

* Default to autohinting and tweak specific fonts to use BCI
* Default to BCI and tweak specific fonts to use autohinting

I'm not sure it makes sense to worry about which approach is best for
the _really commonly used core fonts_ in deciding, because whichever
approach we take, clearly we'll wind up taking care to make sure those
fonts look good. I think the appropriate criterion to use for the
decision is which approach tends to work out best for J. Random Font -
the large body of less-used fonts both within the distro and outside it.
These are the fonts that are _not_ going to get special treatment and
will most likely wind up using the default rendering path, so we should
pick the default rendering path to work best for _those_ fonts, not for
the 'showcase' fonts which we take special care of.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
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