Comment 1 for bug 727733

Hi, sorry I don't know anything about the technical details of font design, but Paul asked me to comment on the mono fonts. I've used both the R17 and R21 fonts, the latter for about a week.

Immediately after installing the R17 fonts, I thought they were a little vertically crowded, but I quickly got used to it. In Emacs windows, Terminal windows and my mail client, I thought the R17 fonts were quite nice at 12pt scale. The only minor downside was that it was difficult to fit two 12pt 80 column wide Terminal windows side-by-side on a 1400x900 screen. There is a little overlap but it's not brutal. :)

The R21 fonts shrank the vertical height of the characters such that 12 point font was too small to comfortably see. Cranking the font size up to 14 (in say Terminal) gave a better result, but had the big downside of shrinking the full-screen height of Terminal by 8 lines. A compromise of 13 point is a little better, but losing the vertical lines in Emacs really isn't acceptable. The only positive to the R21 fonts is that 80 column Terminals at 13 points are narrower than 80 column Terminal R17 font at 12 point, so I can easily fit two Terminals side-by-side in R21.

I'm not sure what the answer is. At this point I like the look of the R17 fonts, but the horizontal spacing of the R21 fonts. Something in the middle that preserves the stingier vertical space of R17 with the stingier horizontal space of R21, with slightly taller glyphs might be a good compromise. Sounds like the changes you're making might help and I'll definitely try them out when they are released.

Cheers.