First look: new Ubuntu font boosts Linux typography | Hacker News Reader

First look: new Ubuntu font boosts Linux typography

arstechnica.com

95 pointsrayboyd49 comments

"Un s a ve d D o cu m e n t 1 - g e d it"... Maybe the kerning is the next thing to improve

The problem with Linux typography isn't a lack of fonts, it's bad rendering. I can buy a font from Adobe. I can't buy a better font renderer for Linux.

When you say "bad rendering", do you mean glyph rendering (FreeType) or the layout stack?

It sounds like he is talking about rasterization which is handled by FreeType.

Kerning is a property of the font, not of the renderer.

I replied to this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1496177

The problem with Linux typography isn't a lack of fonts, it's bad rendering. I can buy a font from Adobe. I can't buy a better font renderer for Linux.

He couldn't have been talking about individual font properties since he said high quality fonts don't make any difference.

I agree. I think it's remarkable that in taking an overt step to improve Linux typography, they managed to compound their problems by introducing a weak, quirky new default font.

... plus, the incredibly good Android "Droid" typeface is available under an open license and looks fantastic on mobile and desktop screens.

So the new Ubuntu font certainly gives them/us something unique, but I'm not yet convinced that it gives them/us greater quality (I'm an Ubuntu member, and have tried this early release).

Plus, you can install Droid on Ubuntu today: ttf-droid.

I did this for my new install of Ubuntu 10.04 and will never go back. I think Google took a lot of time to get that font right, and it looks great on my desktop.

I dislike the look of Droid Serif. I use Droid Sans as my UI font on my netbook (running Ubuntu), though. I'll certainly compare them when the Ubuntu font is released.

The funny part is that all the pieces (FreeType, HarfBuzz, Pango) are really well done, just FreeType isn't tweaked properly. :/

What do you mean, with tweaked properly? Tweaked by developer oder user? BTW I think the droid fonts and dejaWeb look fucking awesome on my loptop. Much better than the fonts on my Windows maschine at work

Tweaked by the packager, who thinks the hinting patents are still valid and hence disables decent hinting during compilation.

How do I configure it myself? Do you have a reference?

Modify the Debian packaging files to provide the correct compilation options - sorry I'm not experienced with this as I've only made RPMs before =- but it should be pretty easy to figure out.

I think that Ubuntu enables hinting on default. According to FreeType's docs/TRUETYPE the TT_CONFIG_OPTION_BYTECODE_INTERPRETER macro should be defined, should you want to enable patent encumbered parts.

On a karmic box:

  $ apt-get source libfreetype6
  $ grep -h TT_CONFIG_OPTION_BYTECODE freetype-2.3.9/debian/patches-freetype/*
  -/* #define TT_CONFIG_OPTION_BYTECODE_INTERPRETER */
  +#define TT_CONFIG_OPTION_BYTECODE_INTERPRETER

Yeah, Windows XP's ClearType does things very badly. I was referring to this article that was posted in a different thread:

http://antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/

+1 This (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1239067) is a question that I posed to Ubuntu brainstorm. The font hinting and rendering patents (held by Apple/Microsoft) are supposedly expired, therefore opening up the way for Freetype to jump ahead by leaps and bounds.

Maybe a little money could be spent on patent due diligence.

Note the window title uses the bold font which it says is unfinished.

Are you sure?

> The bold weight is still being designed and isn't available yet. [ars]

and

> For now, only the regular is available for testing, bold comes next. [ http://design.canonical.com/2010/07/the-ubuntu-font/ ]

Sounds like it might be another font entirely, especially as the whole font is still in beta, but it mentions bold separately that way. But I could be wrong.

right, i used the wrong article. "a" instead of "the". point being, metacity/gtk-window-decorator by default use "a" bold font for the title bar and therefore is either a) not finished b) not it.

Oh wow, that's bad o_O The text in the main field, which I assume is their font, is better... but IMO still needs a bit of work, especially around "d"s and "i"s.

The kerning on the 'i' is off (look at the 'B' 'i' pair), the upper 'I' is indistinct, the ascender on the lower 'l' is grotesquely higher than the cap height (look at 'P' 'l'), and the lower 't' and 's' look like the bastard children of Eurostile. I think it's a mess.

There's a reason everyone tweaks Bitstream Vera; it works. Novelty sans fonts aren't the reason Linux typography sucks.

I'm okay with the high lowercase L, but I am with ya re: the lowercase T and S, they ain't so great.

Is it just me, or did the lowercase T come straight from the Twitter logo?

Great to see! Along the same lines, can anyone shed any light on why Gnome's settings for padding around UI elements is set to such a high value? (compare to OS X, which has very minimal padding around most UI elements).

The padding is there to make the interface cleaner. It forces developers to be more concise with their components as well as making navigation easier for users.

Keep in mind Gnome is meant to be easy to use, not easy on the screen real-estate. If you want a minimalist UI, there are a million alternatives in linux land

That's a laudable goal, but it seems like it just wastes space. I don't want minimalism, I want greatness.

I always wondered about that myself. How exactly do huge UI elements make an UI cleaner and easier to use (we are not talking about touch screens or accessibility features here)? I would say that proper spacing and layout/grouping are much more important for designing a clean UI.

No, seriously. The padding is just too much, to the level that it wastes space.I know too much clutter is bad, but that doesn't mean GNOME people have to increase the padding to this extent.

Can we have a middle ground for padding? Nor too less, nor too much.

If you install Gnome Color Chooser you can select 'compact profile' which is a global setting for padding. It shrinks all of your buttons and other white space without you having to edit the theme by hand:

sudo apt-get install gnome-color-chooser

Find it in System→Prefs menu after install

Thanks for the information.

BTW I have always hand tweaked the font, DPI, and all appearance based settings on a fresh install of any GNOME based distro. I am not enraged on the padding issue, but it would be still nice to see optimal configuration out of box.

This has bothered me for years. Everything just looks so chunky and inelegant. The difference really hits home if you compare Rhythmbox and iTunes (OS X version, not Windows) side by side. Rhythmbox just appears to be wasting so much space.

Arguing that it makes the interface cleaner might seem correct in theory, but in practice it really doesn't seem to hold true. Especially when you compare to OS X, which has an extremely clean interface without any over padding of elements.

In addition to the excessive padding, what bothers me, is that the typeface choices in Linux are so oversized and ugly.

And the way Linux renders Segoe UI is ghastly compared to the Windows rendering.

If you want a smaller font size, you're out of luck since the padding seems to be assuming that you're going to have those big 5/20 vision fonts, so your buttons have a tiny bit of text in the middle, and acres of space round them.

I can't find the specific justifications but I believe it's all described in the GNOME HIG: http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/

Not to say it's necessarily correct, but if you really want to dig into their reasoning, that's where it is.

The font looks too Star-Trekkie, somewhat Romulan in fact. Nice for a logo, but sucks to see that on all the windows.

Remember Nautilus? There was a particular version of Ubuntu that shipped where Nautilus folder doubleclicks kept opening new windows rather than using the same window. DID NOT WANT. And unfortunately Ubuntu shipped with that. The community pushed it back, and so in the next release they knocked that off. So let's hope they don't ship this font as the standard default font.

I appreciate them trying to improve the interface, but forcing everyone from right closing windows to left was too drastic in 10.04 LTS. I quickly reverted back to Clearlooks.

That really is quite pleasing to look at. And as the article mentions, it matches up against the type in the Ubuntu logo nicely. Take note of the 'u', the 'n' and the 'a'.

It is such a small thing, but the font rendering quality has always prevented me from enjoying Linux. I read so much while on the computer the horrible rendering and kerning just nag at me until I don't feel like reading anything else until I switch OS's.

Note that font rendering differs massively between distributions. I prefer Ubuntu's softer (OS X -style) look best. Others might prefer Fedora's crisp (Windows-style) rendering.

Is it the rendering or the font choice that you don't like? I, for one, install Lucida Grande as my system font and Monaco or Menlo as my monotype font and think the design looks much fresher.

Sure, the rendering isn't 100% perfect, but with sub-pixel smoothing, I really don't mind it.

closed beta

Wait, what?

From http://design.canonical.com/2010/07/the-ubuntu-font/:

  > Today all Ubuntu Members will have access to a
  > private PPA so that they can use, test and enjoy
  > the font.
  > 
  > The font is scheduled for completion 8th August
  > and this is when we aim to open the beta to everyone.

So the they are opening usage to a select group prior to the actual completion of the font's design.

I think that makes sense. Perhaps the foundry asked for it. They wouldn't want to any negative comments because the work is not finished yet.

And they probably (rightfully so) fear a wave of mostly-uninformed (read: non-typographic-geek) comments.

Anyone know if Dalton Maag is making a serif font, as well? Despite the long lived computer love affair with sans, serif is becoming more important with higher resolution screens (think Retina Display).

When someone talks about Linux problems with fonts rendering now, I get really confused. I worked on Win/Mac/Linux (currently using Macbook and Ubuntu Desktop) and I have to say Linux has the best font rendering. Compare this:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/113891/pics/font_rendering_linux.png http://dl.dropbox.com/u/113891/pics/font_rendering_macosx.pn...

With this new font, things look even more amazing. Great font.

Can someone provide a download to the actual file? I'd love to play around with it, without jumping through hoops on launchpad with openid and such. Anyone have it or have easy access to it?

The article said it is a closed beta. Perhaps, if you install 10.10 eventually you'll get the new fonts in the repo.

It's beautiful. Despite the flaws, it warms my heart to see that someone is actually taking interface fonts seriously on Linux. I share the controversial belief that games and software are far too obvious to be the reason why Windows got ahead. I think it is the attention to everyday details like fonts, that made Windows more popular.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com