Hinting: 's' looks strangely angular, like '5' @ 12 point

[Stuart Hickinbottom]

Rendered in 15pt Regular

Sample Glyphs:

s

Description:

Just trying the beta of the Ubuntu font. I was trying sizes that will likely be used on screen (10-12point) and, to my eye, the lower case "s" seems oddly irregular and angular. The bottom of the "s" seems nicely curved, but the top portion has an awkward right-angle just before it turns upwards. In fact, it seems more like a "5" than an "s" due to that right-angle and perhaps could be confused as such.

This doesn't affect it at 10pt but is apparent at 12pt.

Screenshot was captured on Chromium 6.0.471.0 on Windows XP.

UA String:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/6.0.471.0 Safari/534.3

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

Hello, you refer to a screenshot, but I can't see one attached. Please could you attach the screenshot in question.

[Malcolm Wooden (malcolm-daltonmaag)]

We have seen this and will make an amendment on the next release.

[Stuart Hickinbottom (stuart-hickinbottom)]

Sorry - just noticed that the screenshot was missing (comment #1) - I think the font feedback tool went wobbly when I originally reported it.

I've seen the later comment saying it's been seen but I thought I'd still attach it in case it was useful to you.

[Mark Shuttleworth (sabdfl)]

Screenshot helps a lot - thanks. We're expecting the next iteration of
the font shortly, will you check if the changes there address it and
update the status if it's really fixed to fix-released?

Mark

[Stuart Hickinbottom (stuart-hickinbottom)]

Will do - thanks Mark.

[Stuart Hickinbottom (stuart-hickinbottom)]

I've just tried the Font Feedback tool again this morning and I can confirm that the originally reported problem is fixed. Many thanks - it's looking good.

[Mark Shuttleworth (sabdfl)]

Thanks Stuart!

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

ubuntu-private-fonts (0.1.10~ppa1) maverick; urgency=low

  * New upstream release.
    - Regular:
      + Misplaced accent above lowercase y corrected. (LP: #619951)
      + Hyphen made 1 pixel heavier in sizes 32-36ppm.
      + Respaced hypen in 8-16 ppm. (LP: #608758)
      + Respace s in 12-18ppm to look less like a 5.
      + Period made 1 pixel lighter az 27 ppm.
      + Lowercase w made wider at 22ppm.
      + Small size (8-9ppm) greyscale improved. (LP: #621456)
      + Accent positions improved where possible. (LP: #622385)
    - Regular & Italic:
      + x height increased 1 pixel at 20,22,24 ppm.
    - Bold Italic:
      + Some Greek Poly glyphs adjusted spacing.
    - All weights:
      + U+0162, U+0163 now have cedilla accents. (LP: #615565)

 -- Daniel Holbach <email address hidden> Wed, 25 Aug 2010 13:26:32 +0200

...this was noted on the changelog, but without its corresponding bug number.