* From: Cam <camilo mesias co uk> * To: For testers of Fedora Core development releases <fedora-test-list redhat com> * Subject: Re: DejaVu fonts for Fedora Core 6 feedback call * Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2006 13:16:38 +0100 Michal, list, OTOH it seems that DejaVu shows up by default in an ExtraLight weight. If this is indeed the case then on many displays Book seems to be better. Is it right that ExtraLight should be so thin that it's unusable? I have seen it as unusably thin on a machine (upgraded from FC5 to FC6t1 using yum). It is a bit of an unusual setup so I haven't reported a bug so far. I manually installed DejaVu for FC5, then removed it and reinstalled after upgrading to FC6. I have set the DPI to 108, which is less than the actual DPI (140 ish), and not the default of 96. I tried out DejaVu and some characters seem to render badly - the 'c' is larger than other lowercase characters, and upper case characters with curves 'O' and 'D' can render with the parts of the curve faded to nothing. I plan to do a clean install of FC6t2 but in the meantime if there's anything I should do to test / debug and give feedback, let me know. Some guidance on the DPI setting would be useful.
ExtraLight is certainly not for using as the default font. Book is. ExtraLight is probably only useful in printing, or big titles on the screen. Did you somehow select ExtraLight as the default font? Or was it selected for you and you didn't notice it?
I think we'll end up changing ExtraLight's family name from "DejaVu Sans" to "DejaVu Sans ExtraLight", by family name I mean NameID 1. The 'preferred family name', i.e. NameID 16, could then be 'DejaVu Sans'. Unfortunately very few apps are able to use the preferred family names. This change of family names would add a new font to the current Gnome/KDE apps font dialog, but would prevent any of those to select ExtraLight as the default DejaVu Sans. In any case, this is an issue that should be fixed in apps. See http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/name.htm for more info.
DejaVu Sans ExtraLight in SVN is now in the DejaVu Sans Light family for legacy systems. In any case if your application is selecting DejaVu Sans ExtraLight by default it is an application bug. The font with weight closest to 400 should be selected by default. ExtraLight has a weight of 200. > I tried out DejaVu and some characters seem to render badly - the 'c' is > larger than other lowercase characters, and upper case characters with > curves 'O' and 'D' can render with the parts of the curve faded to nothing. This is without a doubt the authohinter.
Going to close this bug. We can answer the question "Is it right that ExtraLight should be so thin that it's unusable?" with "yes"... Hinting may help, but that's not going to change the behaviour with the autohinter. Family name of Extralight has changed so it cannot show up as default any more.
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