Use ttf-liberation for default font

[Baptiste Mille-Mathias]

Binary package hint: ubuntu-artwork

Hello,

RedHat released the fonts liberation one year ago, and since hardy it is packaged in universe.
The liberation fonts have really a good shape, and I think better than the standard font used (I think it is BitStream).

Their looking is really sharp and professional.

As their comes in serif, sans and monospace; they can fullfill the usage in desktop.

Regards

[Jan Niklas Hasse (jhasse)]

http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/1113/

[Mantas Kriaučiūnas (mantas)]

Does ttf-liberation fonts contains characters for non-ascii characters, like current ubuntu defaults fonts - ttf-dejavu? Lots of countries from Europa and Asia uses lots of additional symbols, which exists in Unicode (UTF-8) charset, but not in ASCII or ISO-8859-1 (ISO-8859-15).
ttf-dejavu fonts contains characters for most of European and Asian countries, AFAIK ttf-liberation still doesn't contain these characters. So, ttf-liberation can't be default fonts until this problem is fixed.

[Jan Niklas Hasse (jhasse)]

Yes, of course. They are even better hinted:
http://watteimdocht.de/jan-nik/liberation/ (see the greek letters in the gedit screenshots)

[Jan Niklas Hasse (jhasse)]

Why was it declined for Intrepit?

[Mantas Kriaučiūnas (mantas)]

Jan Niklas Hasse wrote on 2008-08-25:
>> Mantas Kriaučiūnas wrote on 2008-08-25: (permalink)
>> Does ttf-liberation fonts contains characters for non-ascii characters, like current ubuntu defaults fonts - ttf-dejavu?
> Yes, of course. They are even better hinted:
> http://watteimdocht.de/jan-nik/liberation/ (see the greek letters in the gedit screenshots)

That screenshot isn't an evidence because of 2 reasons:

1. All gnome and majority of other modern X applications uses fonconfig library and this library automatically replaces missing characters from other fonts - for example you can see Russian and other letters when choose any font if there are at least one similar font with Russian letters (for example DejaVu) in your system. You can test if by simply pasting text bellow (with Russian and few Lithuanian letter) and choose any font (eg. Courier 10 Pitch doesn't contain Russian and Lithuanian letters) in gedit or OpenOffice:
„Я иду домои а вы - нет Ąžuolėlį šienąvę“

2. Existence of Greek letters isn't enough for default font. DejaVu fonts contains thousands of letters for majority of European and Asian countries, more about coverage of various characters in DejaVu fonts you can read at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DejaVu_fonts and http://dejavu.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/dejavu/tags/version_2_26/dejavu-fonts/langcover.txt

So, I still think, that Liberation fonts doesn't contain characters for popular languages, and, because of this, aren't suitable as default Ubuntu fonts. For example /etc/defoma/hints/ttf-liberation.hints file from ttf-liberation package has specifies, that Liberation fonts covers only ISO8859-1 Charset :(
You can compare with the file from ttf-dejavu-core package (/etc/defoma/hints/ttf-dejavu-core.hints ) - as you see DejaVu fonts covers several ISO8859-X Charsets and most importantly - Unicode Charset ISO10646-1

If you have real evidence, that Liberation fonts contains at least major European and Asian Languages like Polish, Greek, Russian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Byelorussian, Czech, etc. and covers big part of Unicode Charset ISO10646-1 then please write an URL to the public source of such information (like this file http://dejavu.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/dejavu/tags/version_2_26/dejavu-fonts/langcover.txt in DejaVu fonts case) and report a bug against ttf-liberation package to include missing charsets in ttf-liberation.hints file.

[Jan Niklas Hasse (jhasse)]

It does include Unicode characters, but you're right: Not as many as Dejavu. I don't know if it covers major European and Asian languages. The only page I found was this one: http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/font/liberation_sans/blocklist.htm

Of course Dejavu is the winner considering Unicode support, but what about hinting and other stuff? Changing the default font to Liberation Sans would fix some display errors. If a web developer writes "sans-serif" his designs will only look broken on linux, because Mac and Windows don't use fonts with a width like Dejavu Sans.

As you said, if a character is missing in Liberation Sans, one of Dejavu or any other font will be used. So why does the lack of some Unicode characters stop Liberation from being the default font?

[Charles (landemaine)]

I suggest offering Ubuntu with Liberation as default font set, and keeping legacy fonts such as the DejaVu font family for certain asian languages. This way, latin users are happy with sharp and modern Liberation font set, while asian users can still display all characters of their languages with DejaVu.

[Eric Appleman (erappleman)]

Has ttf-liberation installed by default been formally declined for Jaunty?

[Mark Shuttleworth (sabdfl)]

I don't know that there is a process to take that decision. Would you
raise it with the Tech Board, please?

[Adolfo Jayme Barrientos (fitojb)]

Well, I'm going to be bold and close this bug. I think it has been superseded since the release of Ubuntu 10.10, that includes the Ubuntu font family as the new default.