On Mon, 2012-09-24 at 15:57 +0200, EatDirt wrote: > I think we should pay attention to the default fonts we will choose for > mga3, indeed. That's the very first reflex of any user, either you like, > or you don't, that would even deserve a contest may be.
Reaction to typefaces depends on several factors - . familiarity (e.g. Europeans are generally more familiar with reading long texts in sans serif faces than Americans); . eyesight, contrast, lighting and viewing distance (this is especially true of whether antialiasing is considered a huge, 10,000 times improvement in readability or is considered an ugly distraction; . rendering quality - irregularities tend to be distracting and cause fatigue but people often say they like them at first; . culture (e.g. Cyrillic / Fraktur / Antiqua); . default font sizes and inter-linear spacing - unfortunately many applications don't give control over inter-linear spacing, showing that the programmers do not have a background in typography :-) There's a whole bunch of research that's been done around each of these factors (and more). You won't find a single set of fonts that works for everyone, and a popular vote probably isn't the best way forward to choose one. On the other foot, a community effort around font packaging and improving themes would likely have a huge benefit. 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 freenode/#xml The barefoot typographer - http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/
