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Re: Better default font
by Ascay on Wednesday 12/Dec/2007, @11:21
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> But all this is a matter of taste of course.
More a matter of fashion or trend. Wide fonts like DejaVu (Standard) or Verdana and Tahoma came up in the late 90s. Nowadays they are quite rarely used on modern user interfaces and look therefore a bit dated.
I didn't say that Vera Bitstream or DejaVu look ugly. On the contrary, I prefer them for longer texts like on webpages (Verdana is quite present there). But on a brand new desktop environment like KDE4 they are a bit out of place in 2008.
Just look at OSX Leopard, Vista, cell phones, consoles (Wii, Xbox 360, PS3), DVD menus, audio players... narrow letters everywhere. People get used to such trends, if you ignore it, it will look dated.
The icons and theme from KDE3 (Krystal, Plastik) look very dated today and got replaced to something much more modern. Great! Why not doing the same with the default font?
> To address your point, there is a variant of DejaVu
> called DejaVu Condensed which is significantly
> narrower. It should make you happy.
I suggested that font in my initial post. :)
But it's not about me. I can change the font settings myself. It's more about a modern look that will appear on screenshots in magazines, on websites etc. |
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Re: Better default font
by Matt on Wednesday 12/Dec/2007, @13:49
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Narrower fonts only make sense in large hi-resolution devices (e.g., 1080p HDTVs, 20+ inch LCDs, etc.). Just try looking at those "modern" fonts on an old-school 1990's SDTV and tell me that narrow fonts are universally good. You can't read shit when the characters are using lines that are thinner than possibly representable on a 480i display...
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Re: Better default font
by Anon on Monday 17/Dec/2007, @07:31
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Nobody cares about your old SDTV anymore.
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Re: Better default font
by Ben on Wednesday 12/Dec/2007, @14:21
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> The icons and theme from KDE3 (Krystal, Plastik) look very dated today and
> got replaced to something much more modern. Great! Why not doing the same
> with the default font?
Fonts aren't something you can make easily. There goes a lot of work in that and that's the reason why there are very few fonts which are usable for screen display. DejaVu is probably the only real OSS font project with a community and with a font usable for screen, and even we didn't design the main glyphs...
Anyway, for a font, the biggest concern should be legibility, not fashion. And legibility for small font sizes was one of the main concerns when vera was designed.
Sure, if you have perfect eysesight, you may prefer something thinner, but I don't think my grandma would be happy with such defaults, unless you also make the default font size bigger.
Another note: DejaVu Condensed fonts aren't hinted (doing that would take a few months full time work, but if someone has a lot of time, we welcome him), so it's not possible to use those as default now. Furthermore, Qt cannot handle the condensed family, which isn't exactly helpful to make them default either...
Finally, the font settings are made by the distro, not KDE. Although there have been talks about adding dependencies on certain fonts in KDE, it'll still be the the distros who will make the defaults... But you can always make a slick preview distro with the funky fonts of course :-)
Greetings
Ben, DejaVu maintainer
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