Technical: tighten tracking of upright+italics by -4/1000 font-wide
Bug #677149 reported by
Paul Sladen
This bug affects 1 person
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Ubuntu Font Family |
Fix Released
|
Wishlist
|
Malcolm Wooden |
Bug Description
Sometimes prose can look spaced out, ideally it would be possible to tighten up the general tracking of the typeface (at all sizes) slightly.
A suggested limit that the tracked can be pulled without changes is about -4/1000 of the em square (square of 1000 for UFF). This should lead to a reduction in overall width of set text by
The tracking of the uprights and italics already differs by approximately -4% aswell; some equivalent reduction for the italics needs to be applied to keep things in proportion.
The -4/1000 adjustment will be applied by adjusting both left-bearing and right-bearing by -2/1000 each.
Related branches
Changed in ubuntu-font-family: | |
milestone: | 0.70 → medium |
status: | Confirmed → Incomplete |
Changed in ubuntu-font-family: | |
milestone: | medium → mono |
Changed in ubuntu-font-family: | |
milestone: | mono → 0.71 |
Changed in ubuntu-font-family: | |
status: | Triaged → Fix Committed |
Changed in ubuntu-font-family: | |
status: | Fix Committed → In Progress |
summary: |
- Technical: tighten tracking of upright+italics by -4% font-wide + Technical: tighten tracking of upright+italics by -4/1000 font-wide |
description: | updated |
Changed in ubuntu-font-family: | |
status: | In Progress → Fix Committed |
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At a meeting on 2010-12-02 the decision was made to go with:
1. a minus 4% font-wide tracking, to tighten the regular fonts across the board
2. further document in style-guide preferred tracking reductions at larger physical sizes
The 4% is hopefully small enough that it will not require extensive re-kerning. It is accepted that the tightened difference will not generally be visible in the user interface as the differences caused by integer rounding at the hinting stages is normally more significant. Very large sizes (banners) are more likely to be professionally prepared, but we cannot expect application developers or users in general to apply this. Mark's best example was the use-case of printing users' email out on paper, and this change covers that by providing a slight perceived improvement.
The Italics are already tighter, so the 4% reduction will likely need applying to those too to keep things in proportional.