On Sun, 2009-06-28 at 15:23 +0200, Christian Perrier wrote: > Shouldn't that be a bug reported against DejaVu fonts, then ? Sure, but I doubt it will be fixed. Hinting glyphs is the hard part of font design, and I don't know of any tools available to people outside the world of commercial font design that exist to help this task. Bitstream estimated that it cost about $10/glyph to hint the current Vera set (in font designer time), and that is with their unpublished hinting toolset. > As I wrote earlier, the goal of DejaVu (to my understanding: I'm not > involved into its development and I'm largely ignorant about hints, indeed). > is more about quality than quantity. So, if there are some reports > that some glyphs' quality is poor, it should be considered important > by DejaVu upstream. I'd love for someone to try their hand at building tools that would let people develop credible hints for free fonts, at this point I don't know how to help though. > When it comes at "rare" character sets, we probably anyway face the > challenge that providing a good quality fonts that remains free > is....a big challenge, as convincing good font authors that free > licences are not a limitation for their work...is not that easy. Which means we shouldn't put these glyphs in the first font that people will end up seeing -- instead, we should enable people to use the best fonts for each language. > We certainly agree on this: wide coverage fonts are good for that > reason and their priority should, by default, be lower than the one of > specialized fonts. After all, I have fnts for about each and every > script in the world on my system jut because I have seeing broken > display for thoe languages. If the fonts are of poor quality, I won't > bother that much as I can't read them anyway...:) Right, so I'd love to see Deja Vu contain only the Latin set which can be derived from the existing high-quality, well hinted, glyphs in the original Vera design, augmented by taking those glyphs and creating the alternate forms which Vera is missing from the extended Latin family. I believe they've gone too far in trying to create a 'universal' font, and want to make sure Debian can offer a better experience in areas where Deja Vu is weak. -- keith.packard@intel.com
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