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...
- widely installed (at least on Linux systems)
- easily readable and not distractingly ugly
- 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