On 20.09.2011 17:01, Humdinger wrote:
Just wanted to provide this link (that probably everyone knows already, because it was one of the first links Google spit out when I looked for the Droid fonts): http://www.fontsquirrel.com/
[...]
BTW, I have changed now from DejaVu to Droid and like it! Even though I had to up the size from 12 to 13, Droid is still smaller (why?) and - at least to me - better readable than DejaVu. It appears like the yellow window tabs get bigger with larger fonts, but have some minimum height so they won't shrink as much as one would expect when using a smaller font.
Thanks a lot for the cool link! I have actually taken some time and looked through the "Sans Serif" section. I've downloaded a few fonts which I thought would be candidates. My selection criteria were the number of available styles, and whether the font was not too extravagant (I can give the exact list I tried). For example, Dejavu has a whole number of different font weights, and it spans a great number of code pages. The Droid font in comparison has only two styles (as Sans Serif).
The big surprise for me was that pretty much /all/ fonts I tried (including Droid) do not look nearly as crisp in Haiku as Dejavu. The readability of Dejavu is far superiour (in Haiku) to any other font, except for maybe Ubuntu. There are two reasons:
* Many fonts are not rendered crisp with our hinting and subpixel anti-aliasing. Droid and many other fonts have colored edges along perfectly straight glpyh stems. It may be that the hinting mechanism (which can be custom bytecode in a TTF) is optimized for another type of subpixel antialiasing (Haiku has it's own, it's not using Freetypes filter).
* The second problem is about kerning. Virtually all fonts except Dejavu have the problem that characters attach to each other, especially at smaller sizes.
I specifically tried Dejavu at 8pts to watch this glyph attaching problem, and Dejavu is virtually the only font I find readable at 8pt of the fonts I tried. Droid isn't so bad in this test, but by far not as crisp as Dejavu.
Best regards, -Stephan
