ubuntu-manual team mailing list archive

[Thorsten Wilms <t_w_@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi!

I created 2 test pages with free/open-source fonts we could use, one for
serif, one for sans-serif.

Inkscape allowed me to scale the text easily to roughly normalize the
capital height, but it can't embed fonts, so the PDF exports are a bit
large and Evince can become slow displaying them.

You need to have the fonts installed on your system for the SVGs to make
sense. See list of fonts at:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-manual/Artwork#Fonts


Direct links to the PDFs:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-manual/Artwork?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=font_test_sans_converted.pdf
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-manual/Artwork?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=font_test_serif_converted.pdf


Please have a look at the PDF files and offer you opinion on which
font(s) are most or least suitable for the body text, title and
headlines (can be different fonts). For italic, we could make a separate
choice.

This is about legibility, evenness of whole blocks of text and our
desired tone (encompassing friendly, serious, competent ...). Must be
solid, but we're not trying to sell insurances and it's not the
typographer's journal ;)

The fonts used in the upper rows support Cyrillic.

The font names shouldn't be prominent to not tap into possible
preconceptions, but to still allow easy identification, they are the
last part of the text for each font.

I used the great Fontmatrix to make a selection out of more than 1700
fonts, just looking for plain text fonts. Many had to be weeded out
because of bad kerning (e.g. if "We" looks more like "W e"). Note that
Fontmatrix in Karmic is slightly broken, better get a fresh one from
their site.


-- 
Thorsten Wilms

thorwil's design for free software:
http://thorwil.wordpress.com/