[Pkg-fonts-devel] Fwd: Draining the font swamp

"Arne Götje (高盛華)" arne at linux.org.tw
Thu May 24 05:02:50 UTC 2007


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Christopher Fynn wrote:
> "Decorative" already has a pretty specific usage as far as fonts are concerned - 
> which I think is slightly different from what you are talking about. Anyway, to 
> avoid confusion, I'd use another name (? "Typographical" or "Print Fonts") 
> rather than "Decorative" for fonts which are nice for printing running or body 
> text. Keep "Decorative" for fancy decorative display faces used in things like 
> headlines and advertising.

Okay, change it to "Print fonts".

> I'm also not quite clear where the division between the two types of fonts is.
> Some fonts are also perfectly OK for screen display and printing when you are 
> doing word processing or in web pages - provided the font size is sufficiently 
> large. These may even be preferable for screen display when working in 
> applications. But with some scripts you definitely do need something else for 
> the GUI (menus etc) where font size is very constrained and legibility is the 
> primary concern.

Well, what I have seen so far is that most users use a 12pt font for
GUI. And for those cases sans-serif fonts are much better than others.
This might not be true for Latin, but certainly for any other more
complex script, especially CJK.
Sure, if you use a 20pt CJK font it also looks nice on the screen, but
usually this is not used.
The main concern here should lie on GUI, as for document processing
users usually choose a specific font to display the characters they
want. And for web pages, well, most websites I have seen so far use a
damn small font size by default. So, the legibility is also the primary
concern here.

But this is just my opinion. ;)

Cheers
Arne
- --
Arne Götje (高盛華) <arne at linux.org.tw>
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