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