[OpenFontLibrary] New Ubuntu Font

[Liam R E Quin]

On Fri, 2010-03-05 at 14:41 +0100, Schrijver wrote:

> I really do not like the look of the Vera Sans based fonts that are
> now the default fonts on most Linux distros (if I’m not mistaken).
> That is no fault of the Deja-vu teams, it is just that the original
> design on which they are based I think is hugely unattractive :-(

It's subjective. :) For my part I'm happy with them. The font family
is fairly suitable for use on the screen, and the designer, Jim Lyles,
made some changes (e.g. making sure that o, O and 0 were clearly
distinct, and 1/l/|), at our request...

A few years ago a group of us got together and said that we needed to
have some high-quality fonts for GNOME - this got expanded to, "for the
whole community".

Actually "dejaVu" is more common today, unfortunately. I say
"unfortunately" because it's an extension, not by the original designer,
to attempt to add complete Unicode coverage in one font -- but because
of the philosophy of Unicode, you actually need multiple fonts in order
to take "script" into account, and not only for Chinese/Japanese/Korean
selection, but even for a-z0-9. So instead of writing programs that
can assume a single font has everything they need, programs need to
cope with a list of fonts in some environments.

> > It will be published under an open font
> > license, and considered part of the trade dress of Ubuntu, which will
> > limit its relevance for software interfaces outside of Ubuntu but
> 
> What do they mean by that?

It means that another Linux distribution might not be allowed to use the
typeface as part of their branding or marketing, e.g. probably not as
the default font for a desktop.

> It could represent a leap in the usability of linux for the desktop in
> general, not just ubuntu 
I doubt that :) There's no reason to suppose it will come out better (or
worse) than Vera; Brian is an experienced type designer, although he's
not Matthew Carter or Hermann Zapf :-) and so is Jim Lyles, but remember
also Microsoft paid Monotype for over 100 person-years for the Windows
95 core fonts... (supposedly)


> Though the whole Gnome interface could undergo some serious visual scrutiny imho
It's getting that. Please send specific comments or positive suggestions
to the usability list. The GNOME project is not part of Ubuntu,
of course...

I've been waiting for OLFB to get to the point where it has previews and
feels like something where a font design would be pleased to see their
work before going back to the people who offered to donate fonts in the
past and asking again. So that may happen this year too, which would be
way cool.  On the other hand, the typographic support on the Free
desktop is at the level proprietary software reached in the 1980s...
a lot of applications don't even let you specify line spacing... so
having more fonts is an essential and exciting part of a much bigger
picture. Hence, for example, http://www.libregraphicsmeeting.org/

Liam


-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org