Bug 7273

Summary:	same symbols in all typefaces
Product:	DejaVu	Reporter:	Denis Jacquerye <moyogo>
Component:	General	Assignee:	Deja Vu bugs <dejavu-bugs>
Status:	RESOLVED NOTABUG	QA Contact:
Severity:	minor
Priority:	medium
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	All
OS:	All
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:

Description Denis Jacquerye 2006-06-19 13:20:33 UTC

Some symbols from the Geometric Shape and Miscellaneous blocks have the same
weight in all typefaces (Sans or Mono). This is not very useful to have the
exact same complex glyphs in many fonts.

Sans Bold should have symbols with bolder outlines, they should look darker when
possible.

This is also taking a lot of unnecessary space. If the user is not supposed to
use Oblique symbols, then the symbols should not be present in the Oblique font.

Comment 1 Bhikkhu Pesala 2006-12-11 04:29:13 UTC

Not so. 

The size of the font data is not critical on modern PCs. What is critical is, if 
the Bold or italic style doesn't contain the symbol glyphs, Windows will simulate 
italics and/or bold, distorting the glyph form its intended design. 

Worse still, if output to PDF, all Faux Bold and Faux Italics glyphs will be 
converted to curves, resulting in a huge increase in the size of the PDF. 

In an ideal world, the users would not apply bold or italics to symbols that do 
not require it, such as Geometric shapes, but they may use symbols within bold or 
italic text and will never even consider changing that glyph back to regular.

Therefore, all four typestyles should contain copies of all the symbols, and the 
character advance width should not change, though symbols in italic glyphs 
benefit from being offset to the right instead of being centred. Many symbols are 
monospaced, but some require a wider (∞) or narrower (∫) advance width.

In my fonts, I added some alternate glyphs as Easter Eggs on bold, italic, and 
bold italic typestyles among the symbols, but it is too much work to design bold 
or italic versions of each glyph, especially as in most cases, such designs would 
be inappropriate. Though one might design a bold Lozenge (\u25CA), if one 
designed a bold black small square (\u25AA) it would be similar to black medium 
small square (\u25FE). 

Possibly there is a flag somewhere that tells Windows not to embolden Unicode 
symbols or try to make an italic, but I haven't found it yet.

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