elementary OS

Improvements to the default font set

Bug #1713533 reported by Antonio Camargo
12
This bug affects 2 people
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elementary OS
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Bug Description

In order to improve the design quality of elementary OS, we should improve the quality of the fonts included in the system. Currently, there're many gimmicky and redundant fonts included in the OS and there's a lack of coverage of some typeface classes.

To start a project to improve this situation, I prepared a list of typefaces that could be used in the new set of system fonts. My main goals were:

* Including a good variety of typefaces from the main categories.

* Choosing good fonts of every family, offering a complete set of nice quality typefaces for every need. The fonts should be chosen with the license in mind, so that we would only include typefaces that are freely distributable.

* Prioritizing fonts with a range of styles (avoiding the ones that have a single style)

This list is the result of my work:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hElei0xMQKLaiL-MKvbUP-huYqQL0uORPy6QYmu4Sw4/edit?usp=sharing

The list may not contain all the typefaces that are being used by the system. "Limelight" and "HVD Bodedo", for example, are not included in this list, even tough they're used in the AppCenter. If it's chosen that these fonts will continue to be used, they should be included in the list.

Finally, I would be pleased to add any member of the Design Team as a contributer to the document.

See original description
Revision history for this message
Waldir Pimenta (waldyrious) wrote :

Great initiative! Two comments: please change the sharing settings to allow comments by anyone with the link, and include image samples of the fonts in the tables, for convenience.

Also, are you planning to include commentary for all rows? I think you should justify every inclusion as well as every removal from the current set.

Finally, please include the script coverage of each font (Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, and CJK, and etc.)

Revision history for this message
Antonio Camargo (antoniop-camargo) wrote :

Thank you for your suggestions.

I'll update the link to allow comments.

I do not plan to comment every row because most additions are there because the typeface is of high quality and there's no simmilar font installed in the system. But I'll try to add some new commentaries.

The script coverage for most fonts is enormous and would disrupt the entire document. This information can be found in Font Squirell.

description: updated
Revision history for this message
Zisu Andrei (matzipan) wrote :

Interesting innitiative. However, I see that it doesn't cover one very important aspect at all: licenses. The license needs to allow inclusion in the distribution and be compatible with the other licenses that we ship.

Revision history for this message
Antonio Camargo (antoniop-camargo) wrote :

Unfortunately I can't check all the licenses right now, but I'm sure that almost all of these fonts can be freely distributed (with the exception of some script typefaces).

Their license can be easily checked in their pages in Font Squirell. I'll update the document as soon as I can.

Revision history for this message
Antonio Camargo (antoniop-camargo) wrote :

I've added the licenses for all the fonts in the document

Revision history for this message
Zisu Andrei (matzipan) wrote :

Neal Gompa pointed us to the Fedora font licenses documentation: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:Main#Font_Licenses

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