* Calum Benson <Calum.Benson at Sun.COM> [2008-11-10 17:15]: >> Why is this the default font? > > It was chosen because most of the people we asked (in an admittedly > small and unscientific survey) thought it was a better compromise > between compactness and legibility than the font we were previously > using. > > So far we've had few complaints (except when we changed the size in b99 > as well, a change which we reverted in b100). But if we get enough > negative feedback, then of course we will reconsider for the next > release.
While I understand that full hinting is disabled by default because of patent issues, I don't get why anybody would want to use DejaVu/Bitstream Vera fonts without full hinting as font rendering is very unsharp and fuzzy. Did your survey include hinting? For a direct comparison see http://defect.opensolaris.org/bz/attachment.cgi?id=519 . The condensed variant prevents hinting, i.e. enabling hinting is not enough and you need to change all Gnome fonts as well which took me a while to figure out. Denis Jacquerye, one of the DejaVu project leaders, summed it up on the dejavu-fonts list this March: [...] > Condensed are very experimental, and has only been created after some > people requested them. We don't provide the proper amount of work for > it to be useable at the same level as the regular width fonts. For > example, Condensed is not hinted, so it will look bad compared to > hinted fonts. [...] (see http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.fonts.dejavu/3444) -- Guido Berhoerster
