[Mageia-dev] new fonts?

[Liam R E Quin]

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/