Re: Cantarell?

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Wed, 2011-01-12 at 16:52 +0100, Maciej Piechotka wrote:
> On Wed, 2011-01-12 at 11:53 +0000, Allan Day wrote: 
> > Andrew Cowie wrote:
> > > On Mon, 2011-01-10 at 12:33 -0500, Owen Taylor wrote:
> > > >  * The default font will be changing to Cantarell 
> > > 
> > > Cantarell?
> > > 
> > > If Cantarell is this, http://abattis.org/cantarell/ which says
> > > 
> > >         As my very first typeface design... designed for on-screen
> > >         reading; in particular, reading web pages on an HTC Dream mobile
> > >         phone ...  font file currently contains 391 glyphs
> > > 
> > > then at first glance it seems an odd choice.
> > > 
> > > DejaVu serves us well with outstanding coverage across the Unicode space
> > > and one of the only fonts with complimentary Serif, Sans, and Sans Mono
> > > families. Do we need to replace it?
> > 
> > It's not a question of coverage; it's about style (though we need to use
> > fonts that have good coverage, of course). The visual style that has
> > been developed for GNOME 3 is one that aspires to be subtle and refined.
> > Stylistically, Cantarell accords with that in a way that DejaVu does
> > not. Another aim for GNOME 3 is to ensure that the new desktop is
> > visually distinctive. Cantarell is a better choice than DejaVu here,
> > too.
> > 
> > I'm really excited that we're using this new font for GNOME 3; it has a
> > really nice design and will give the new desktop an extra bit of
> > sophistication.
> > 
> > Allan
> 
> According to my fast check (which may be wrong) it seems that it does
> not cover still used Greek alphabet (tech people aside it is still used
> in greek language). It does not cover Cyrilic (used among others in
> Russian) and Chinese and Hindi (I copy the names of national anthem from
> wikipedia) as well. That alone would make early 40% of world's
> population according to Wikipedia (sure - probably most Hindi users are
> bilingual but they would still want to see their documents' titles -
> fonts are even more important then translation)[1].
> 
> I don't think that using Latin alphabet (+ few extentions) + few others
> (such as Arabic) should be requirement for GNOME 3.0. While it may not
> be a problem for webpage (it is usually in one language controlled by
> creator) it is for desktop where you will find large variety of
> languages.

DejaVu still exists and will probably still be installed. How bad
does it look for DejaVu Cyrillic characters to be shown alongside
Cantarell Latin characters?

(IIRC, we had the same issue when switching to Vera, before it was
forked into DejaVu and other alphabets were added.)

--
Shaun