Universal themes: a proposal

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le samedi 10 avril 2010 à 17:15 +0200, François Revol a écrit :

> Again, it makes sense for OSes that do have centralized package 
> management...

Does not change a bit for other systems, as soon as you introduce a new
font source managed differently than others you'll get conflicts. The
problem is not package management or not the problem is multiple sources
and handling for a generic item (fonts) that users expect to behave the
same system-wide

> Remember we are talking about Themes, which are supposed to be applied 
> to the whole desktop itself (mostly) (I hate skinned apps cause the 
> break GUI consistency, but desktop themes are not the same).
> So the font should stay consistent, at least for the desktop it is 
> applied to.

Text is also displayed in apps (browsers, office apps, design apps,
whatever). Having the same font in windows decorations or widgets, and
inside app windows (which you can't rely on not happening because a user
that likes a font will set it everywhere), but behaving differently
(because the font version is not the same or the rendering settings is
not the same), is already a common user complain, and letting themes use
fonts not taken from the system font pool and processed by the system
font rules is going to make it worse.

Consistency in text is a primary user demand. They don't care if letters
are different on another system (and in fact different systems make
wildly different rendering choices), but they demand that on the same
screen they are rendered and placed exactly the same way if the same
font name is selected. And they won't understand if foo font behaves one
way in the app windows (because the app uses foo at version x, the
version installed system-wide) and another in the windows decorations
(because the theme used embeds foo font at version y)

And this is what you'll get if you allow font embedding, because most
theme authors lack imagination, and will embed common fonts just in case
they are not present on system. Your most common font is going to be
Arial.

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot
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