On 02/15/2014 09:54 PM, Ryan Kaldari wrote: > Now that I've blamed everyone except for myself, I would like to suggest > that we stop pointing fingers and get down to brass tacks. > > My question for both the designers and the free font advocates is: Are > there any free fonts that are... > 1. widely installed (at least on Linux systems) > 2. easily readable and not distractingly ugly > 3. would not be mapped to by the existing stack anyway (i.e. are not simply > clones or substitutes for popular commercial fonts)
I have been very happy with the crisp rendering and screen-optimized shape of DejaVu Sans selected as the default sans-serif font on Debian Linux. At a given size it is about as readable as Verdana while looking (to my eyes at least) more elegant. DejaVu Sans has a fairly good unicode coverage by itself, and in my limited experience fontconfig picks good other fonts for rare scripts. I have not seen any tofu on Linux in a long time. The rendering of the font refresh beta on my Linux box seems to be Helvetica without subpixel rendering (blurry), which is a real regression from the status quo. I am not entirely sure that there is actually a problem to solve on an average Linux desktop installation, but am willing to be convinced otherwise with a documentation of the issues encountered. Some of the limitations you are trying to address seem to be platform-specific. Could we address those in a targeted way without making things worse for other platforms? Gabriel _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
