[opensuse-factory] Default font in gnome
I have to say one nice change would be to change the default "Sans" font to something nicer... "FreeSans" renders way better with the font smoothing. The "sans" font is functional but IMO a little ugly... Erik. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org
On 2008/06/12 13:58 (GMT-0400) Putrycz, Erik apparently typed:
I have to say one nice change would be to change the default "Sans" font to something nicer... "FreeSans" renders way better with the font smoothing. The "sans" font is functional but IMO a little ugly...
Picking "best" font is like picking best distro or most beautiful woman or best steak. Opinions differ, and depend on environment among other things. You can change entries in ~/.fonts.conf and/or /etc/fonts/suse-post-user.conf to change your own "best". In the latter file, you can move FreeSans from its current list position to above the Arial line to cause "Sans" on your system to be FreeSans. "Sans" is nothing but a fontconfig alias. Look at the screenshots and testcases in https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=396183 & https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=393748 & you can see some of the variations in font appearance among the available fonts themselves. You should be able to use those testcases to decide which font is actually displayed as "Sans" on your system. One man's prize is another's poison. My favorites all result from using the autohinter with antialiasing, while I have no appreciation from results from using the supposedly preferable byte code interpreter. -- "Where were you when I laid the earth's foudation?" Matthew 7:12 NIV Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 Felix Miata *** http://fm.no-ip.com/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org
On Thu, 2008-06-12 at 13:58 -0400, Putrycz, Erik wrote:
I have to say one nice change would be to change the default "Sans" font to something nicer... "FreeSans" renders way better with the font smoothing. The "sans" font is functional but IMO a little ugly...
We'll be discussing defaults like this for 11.1 (look for "Policy"
emails) if you want to join the opensuse-gnome@opensuse.org mailing list
or the meetings.
-JP
--
JP Rosevear
"Putrycz, Erik"
I have to say one nice change would be to change the default "Sans" font to something nicer... "FreeSans" renders way better with the font smoothing. The "sans" font is functional but IMO a little ugly...
"Sans" is just an alias which expands to the first font in the
"sans-serif" prefer list in /etc/fonts/suse-post-user.conf which is
installed *and* supports the language of your current locale.
I quote this list here:
<alias>
<family>sans-serif</family>
<prefer>
<family>Arial</family>
<family>Albany AMT</family>
<family>Verdana</family>
<family>DejaVu Sans</family>
<family>Liberation Sans</family>
<family>SUSE Sans</family>
<family>Bitstream Vera Sans</family>
<family>Nimbus Sans L</family>
<family>Luxi Sans</family>
<family>Mukti Narrow</family>
<family>Nachlieli CLM</family>
<family>Helvetica</family>
<family>Khmer OS System</family>
<family>Lohit Punjabi</family>
<family>Pothana2000</family>
<family>TSCu_Paranar</family>
<family>BPG Glaho</family>
<family>Terafik</family>
<family>FreeSans</family>
<family>Meiryo</family>
<family>MS PGothic</family>
<family>MS Gothic</family>
<family>HGPGothicB</family>
<family>HGGothicB</family>
<family>IPAPGothic</family>
<family>IPAGothic</family>
<family>Sazanami Gothic</family>
<family>Kochi Gothic</family>
<family>CMEXSong</family>
<family>FZSongTi</family>
<family>AR PL ShanHeiSun Uni</family>
<family>FZMingTiB</family>
<family>AR PL SungtiL GB</family>
<family>AR PL Mingti2L Big5</family>
<family>UnDotum</family>
<family>Baekmuk Gulim</family>
<family>Baekmuk Dotum</family>
</prefer>
</alias>
I.e. "sans" might expand to "DejaVu Sans" if your locale is en_US.UTF-8
and you have neither the agfa-fonts nor the Microsoft webfonts installed.
If your locale is ja_JP.UTF-8 however, it will expand by default to
IPAPGothic because this is usually the first font in the list which
supports Japanese and is installed by default when Japanese support is
selected during the installation.
To get reasonable defaults for all languages, one should not use
specific font names as the default in the Gnome/KDE/... whatever setup
but stay with these aliases.
To change the defaults, the above preference list should be tweaked.
If you prefer the fonts from the freefont package, you can make
these the default for the "serif", "sans-serif", and "monospace"
aliases by adding the following rules to your ~/.fonts.conf file:
<alias>
<family>serif</family>
<prefer>
<family>FreeSerif</family>
</prefer>
</alias>
<alias>
<family>sans-serif</family>
<prefer>
<family>FreeSans</family>
</prefer>
</alias>
<alias>
<family>monospace</family>
<prefer>
<family>FreeMono</family>
</prefer>
</alias>
The ~/.fonts.conf is read *before* /etc/fonts/suse-post-user.conf.
For the "prefer" lists this has the effect the the prefer lists
from ~/.fonts.conf are added to the *top* of the prefer lists from
/etc/fonts/suse-post-user.conf, i.e. the user specified fonts
are preferred.
To check what a specific alias expands to for a certain language,
use fc-match:
mfabian@magellan:~$ locale
LANG=ja_JP.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="ja_JP.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="ja_JP.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="ja_JP.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="ja_JP.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="ja_JP.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="ja_JP.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="ja_JP.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="ja_JP.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="ja_JP.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="ja_JP.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="ja_JP.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="ja_JP.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=
mfabian@magellan:~$ fc-match sans
ipagp.ttf: "IPAPGothic" "Regular"
mfabian@magellan:~$ LANG=km_KH.UTF-8 fc-match sans
KhmerOS_sys.ttf: "Khmer OS System" "Regular"
mfabian@magellan:~$ LANG=en_GB.UTF-8 fc-match sans
arial.ttf: "Arial" "Normal"
mfabian@magellan:~$
By the way, I think the "DejaVu" fonts render much better then the
"freefont" fonts, the "DejaVu" font project is also a lot more active in
further developing the fonts.
--
Mike FABIAN
Thanks a lot for the explanation. I have a basic en_US.UTF-8 locale - I would expect most font would be compatible. The font handling is a little less obscure for me now. The locale issue probably explains why the font handling is a little sensitive. I agree about the déjà vu font, I was using the déjà vu condensed, it was looking great but then it did not work in java swing applications. I will subscribe to the opensuse gnome list to since the defaults are obviously being reconsidered for 11.1. I fully understand that fonts are like colors and each user do have a preference, but the default is IMO far from the experience with "reasonable defaults" in other OSes - my preference being to vista with their new cleartype.
By the way, I think the "DejaVu" fonts render much better then the "freefont" fonts, the "DejaVu" font project is also a lot more active in further developing the fonts.
Erik. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org
"Putrycz, Erik"
I agree about the déjà vu font, I was using the déjà vu condensed, it was looking great but then it did not work in java swing applications.
I haven’t tried that. Why not? What happens?
I will subscribe to the opensuse gnome list to since the defaults are obviously being reconsidered for 11.1. I fully understand that fonts are like colors and each user do have a preference, but the default is IMO far from the experience with "reasonable defaults" in other OSes - my preference being to vista with their new cleartype.
Cleartype (called "subpixel hinting" on Linux) is a bit of a problem
for two reasons
- not compiled into freetype2 by default
- even if it is compiled into freetype2, it doesn’t look nice
because no gamma correction is done (Windows does this).
You can test the effect of gamma correction with
ftview 20 /usr/share/fonts/truetype/DejaVuSans.ttf
Then press F1 for help, switch on subpixel hinting
(you need a freetype2 package with subpixel hinting enabled)
and change the gamma correction to 2.1. Then it almost
looks like the rendering on Windows. But gamma correction
is currently only implemented in the demo and test tool
ftview, it is not yet implemented in applications
like Gnome/KDE/... Maybe it could be implemented in the
freetype2 library directly to avoid the need of having
it to implement in every single application again.
--
Mike FABIAN
On 2008/06/13 14:02 (GMT-0400) Putrycz, Erik apparently typed:
By the way, I think the "DejaVu" fonts render much better then the "freefont" fonts, the "DejaVu" font project is also a lot more active in further developing the fonts.
I agree about the déjà vu font, I was using the déjà vu condensed, it was looking great but then it did not work in java swing applications.
FWIW, all recent releases of Ubuntu, Mandriva & Fedora have the DejaVus and Veras as the first entries in their alias lists in /etc/fonts/conf.avail/##-latin.conf, except maybe in Fedora 9 the Liberations might be the first entries. I only have one Fedora 9 install, and I think I rearranged to put the Liberations first in order to do some testing and didn't save copies of the originals.
I fully understand that fonts are like colors and each user do have a preference, but the default is IMO far from the experience with "reasonable defaults" in other OSes - my preference being to vista with their new cleartype.
Do you have Arial, Verdana and Albany installed on yours? Because if you have none of those, and do have DejaVu installed (which happens by default) and locale en_US.UTF-8, then your Sans _is_ DejaVu Sans, same as most other popular distros. If your preference is for the ClearType look (like me), then I suggest you configure your SUSEs to use only autohinter and AA (via ~/.fonts.conf entries), then see how FreeSans compares to the others. By default, you're using the byte code interpreter (full hinting) instead of the autohinter, and the byte code interpreter will not make the best available fonts look anything like ClearType does. -- "Where were you when I laid the earth's foudation?" Matthew 7:12 NIV Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 Felix Miata *** http://fm.no-ip.com/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org
participants (4)
-
Felix Miata -
JP Rosevear -
Mike FABIAN -
Putrycz, Erik