Cyrillic small "b" looks like Greek small delta in DejaVu Sans and DejaVu Sans Condensed (but not in DejaVu Sans Mono, DejaVu Serif or DejaVu Serif Condensed). This appearance seems too fancy and archaic for a font that is going to be default for the free desktop. Most other Sans fonts, including Tahoma, Verdana, Numbus Sans L and URW Gothic L use a 6-like representation with an ascender. It is also used in in Dejavu Sans Mono, DejaVu Serif or DejaVu Serif Condensed. A more formal font could use a version without ascender, just a scaled down capital Cyrillic "b", but it's probably not good for readability. I think the delta-like small Cyrillic "b" should be replaced with the 6-like small Cyrillic "b" from DejaVu Sans Mono, perhaps with minimal adjustments.
The be that looks like delta originates from the Serbian form of be. It is a known issue and it is likely to be replaced in the near future (the Serbian be was already replaced in Serif and Mono, by Andrey Panov). Sans should follow soon.
*** Bug 7452 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I'm the guy behind bug 7452. The following things look wrong to me in Russian DejaVu 2.7: In DejaVu Sans, the "b" is a medieval relic (as Pavel Roskin already said). The descenders on the bottom of "d", "ts", and "sch" look too long -- they are as long as the tail of "u", but in virtually all Russian typefaces, they are only small downward notches. More annoyingly, the left stem of "d" and "l" curves to the left too much -- in Russian typefaces where the "d" and "l" have a flat top, the left stem is supposed to be pretty much vertical and curve left only a little at the very bottom, sort of like the Latin letter "J", but in DejaVu Sans the stems look more like the bottom-right quarter of a circle. In DejaVu Sans and Sans Mono, the "r" and "R" look a bit weird, almost as if they were mirror-images of Latin "R". Either the left tail of the "R" should be more vertical, or it should join the loop more to the right. Plus the DejaVu tail of the "R" is, imho, too convex. It looks especially annoying in upper-case "R" in small font sizes -- there, the left tail and the bottom of the loop look like they form the upper-left quarter of a circle, while the effect is much more polygonal in virtuall all Russian sans-serif typefaces. Look at the way Arial and Bitstream Vera Sans do the "R"... Finally -- I am not sure whether this is a bug in my freetype or in DejaVu -- some Russian letters seem to be rendered differently from the others of the same face at the same size. This problem affects lower-case "hard sign" (U+044A), "y" (U+044B), and "e" (U+044D) in most of the DejaVu faces. Depending on the selected font size, these letters are either rendered too large compared to their neightbors, or too drawn too fuzzily, or are half-bolded for some reason. Of course, all of this is my personal preference, but I am confident that most people who are used to standard Russian fonts and Russian printed material will agree with me.
Created attachment 6158 [details] Show all DejaVu fonts in Cyrillic (base Russian letters only) All DejaVu fonts except "DejaVu Sans ExtraLight" (no idea how to make it work)
Regarding comment #3: I agree about descenders, but we don't want to cut them too much. The font should work on screen in low resolutions. Cutting the descenders by 1/3 should be fine. Regarding small "d" and "l", I think "d" is fine in "Sans" and Sans Condensed", but "l" is indeed too curved. It could be shrunk horizontally a bit. I don't see anything wrong with "r". If you mean "ya", then indeed it's too "puffy" and could be shrunk in the lower half. Now, since this becomes a bug for all Cyrillic letters, here's what I'd like to see fixed. Capital "Tche" is higher than other letters in Sans Mono bold and Bold Oblique. Shorter middle stem in "sha" and "shcha" (both small and capital) in Sans and Sans Condensed creates a "dip" on top of the letter, which is distracting and annoying. I prefer the letter tops aligned. Dots over capital "Yo" are not centered, which is mostly visible in Sans. The top of the "hard sign" (both small and capital) is a bit too long in Sans and Sans Condensed. Not only the descenders on "tse" and "shcha" (both small and capital) are too long, the lines leading to them are too long in Sans and Sans Condensed (i.e they don't need to be so far to the right).
re comment 5: Yes, I meant "ya" not "r". Very sorry -- hash table collision in brain. The DejaVu Sans "ya" looks too much like a latin "R"... Regarding the descenders of "d" at low resolutions: I was mosrtly thinking of font size 10-13. At those sizes, the descenders could eaily be shrunk by 50%. I think the reason the "d" doesn't look like it needs shrinking is because the annoyance of long descenders is overshadowing the annoyance of excessive width. I don't care either way about the middle stem in "sh" and "sch". I'm fine with it long, and I'm fine with it short. I fully agree with your comments about "ch", "yo", and the tails of the "hard sign", "ts", and "sch". It seems DejaVu designers went a bit overboard with the size of all the tails and descenders.
There are quite a lot of different aspects discussed here. I would like to vote for the original title that cyrillic letter "b" in DejaVu sans is inappropriate for a classical sans font. As for differently rendered hard sing, "y" and "e", I posted two separate bugs, namely 7596 and 7602.
Most issueas including "be" are fixed now in svn tree. The issue with "ya" is addressed to https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7702 .
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