[haiku-development] Re: Default Font Choice In Haiku should likely be changed
- From: John Scipione <jscipione@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 19 Oct 2011 23:35:47 -0400
>
> 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.
>
Perhaps Google's new Roboto font could be an option, It is an
Arial/Helvetica clone. I am not sure about the license, but it might be
similar to the Droid fonts.
http://briefmobile.com/download-roboto-font-from-android-4-0
John Scipione
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