Default fonts in Firefox

[Ming Hua]

On Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 04:10:47PM +0200, Matthias Klose wrote:
> The Bitstream Vera fonts i.e. don't have explicit oblique shapes,
> but the DejaVu fonts have.

That not entirely true, as Vera provides ten fonts, including the
oblique shapes for Sans, Sans Bold, Sans Mono, and Sans Mono Bold.  It's
just the oblique shapes for Serif and Serif Bold are missing.

The DejaVu fonts indeed provide oblique shapes for Serif fonts, but (1)
those fonts are labelled experimental and probablly haven't go through
enough testing; and more importantly, (2) for serif fonts, most people
will expect italic shape, instead of the just slanted oblique shape
provided by DejaVu.

> The DejaVu fonts are derived from the Bitstream Vera fonts, but add more
> glyphs, particularily for eastern european languages, but should be
> exchangeable with the Bitstream Vera fonts.

In my opinion that's the most important thing about DejaVu, more glyphs.
They probably have twice as many glyphs as Vera now, maybe even more.

However the ascii/latin1 part of DejaVu is not exactly same as Vera,
I've see quite some bug reports about different rendering for DejaVu and
Vera.  So while I agree DejaVu is a great project, we probably want to
test it more before setting it to the default font, and certainly not
at such a late time in the release cycle.

Ming
2005.09.29