[Pkg-fonts-devel] ttf-bitstream-vera should not have been removed

[Christian Perrier]

Quoting Keith Packard (keithp at keithp.com):

> One of the big efforts with Bitstream was in adjusting the instructed
> hints within the font to take advantage of our text rendering
> environment; considerable effort was applied in tuning those for
> FreeType and Xft. Cairo adopts the same text rendering techniques as
> Xft, and so those hints remain optimized for our software.
> 
> The glyphs added to Deja Vu do not have hand-constructed hints, and so
> they appear effectively unhinted.

Shouldn't that be a bug reported against DejaVu fonts, then ?

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.


> Wide coverage within the Latin set would be fine, but attempting to take
> Deja Vu and extend it to non-Latin (or Latin-derived fonts, like
> Cyrilic) is quite a stretch -- take a look at the Georgian glyphs added
> to Deja Vu Serif -- not exactly stylistically matched to the Latin
> portion of the face (nor should they be).

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.

> Sure, but the default should be to let people select 'good' fonts for
> the languages they care about and 'wide coverage' fonts for the rest.
> 
> That's why I have Deja Vu installed on my system, but at lower priority
> for all character sets than fonts optimized for those languages.

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...:)



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