Comment 1 for bug 677149

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.