Re: A11y woes

[Simos Xenitellis <simos74 gmx net>]

O/H Clytie Siddall έγραψε:
> On 19/02/2006, at 10:58 PM, Don Scorgie wrote:
>
> > 1. Fonts
> > I've added a little about the "Fixed width font" and "Document font" so
> > far.  However, I don't really know what they're actually used for :( So,
> > are these descriptions even vaguely related to reality:
> > Document font: font to use for displaying documents.
> > Fixed Width font: font to use for editing documents.
>
> I can contribute a little here.
>
> Variable-width fonts, which I hope the 'document fonts" are, are 
> reading fonts. However accustomed we might become to reading terminal 
> text, variable-width fonts lead the eye more effectively. (Serif also 
> comes into this, for body text.) More specifically, accented languages 
> look terrible in fixed-width fonts. (I was recently unable to start 
> using an application I would have found very useful, because it didn't 
> support variable-width fonts, and I can't edit for long in Vietnamese 
> in fixed-width.)
>
> True Unicode variable width fonts include: Lucida Grande, Arial, 
> Gentium, Junicode, Titus Cyberbit Basic, and fonts created by language 
> groups for Unicode (I have some beautiful fonts created for 
> Vietnamese, but they cover the whole Unicode set.)
Gentium is distributed under the Open Font License 
(http://scripts.sil.org/OFL), meaning that it is free and can be 
included in Linux distrubutions.

Titus Cyberbit Basic has been derived from a Bitstream font and licensed 
from Bitstream (the company). I contacted the institute behind Titus 
Cyberbit Basic in case they can re-release the font with an open 
license; they said they are bound by the license from Bitstream. Titus 
Cyberbit Basic was specially created to support many languages. Due to 
the license, it cannot be included by default in distributions.

There is a new font, Dejavu, derived from Bitstream Vera, that offers 
Sans, Serif and Monospace (fixed) versions, and this one appears to get 
distributed by default in distributions. For example, the new Ubuntu is 
using this font by default. Dejavu has support for the Latin Extended 
Unicode range, so it should have glyphs for Vietnamese as well.

For the fonts that appear by default in GNOME, there is a file that 
determines what's going on. As you may have several fonts that support 
Vietnamese, which one does GNOME choose to display text?
The file is /etc/fonts/fonts.conf and it defines a list of font 
preferences to go through in order to find glyphs for your language. 
Therefore, to have your prefered font actually used, its position in the 
preference list should be such that the proper glyphs get used.

Simos
> Fixed-width fonts are used for code, numbers, some types of tabular 
> display and ASCII art ;). They make it easier to distinguish 
> individual letters, and columns of letters. They are not for fluent 
> reading, reading of sentences, paragraphs etc. You do get accustomed 
> to them, to some extent, if you edit a lot in the terminal, but they 
> are are harder to scan through, particularly for very ill/disabled 
> people like me.
>
> The only true Unicode fixed-width font of which I know is Everson Mono.
>
> I hope this is useful.