In addition, the default size for the panel and menus is 16px, which seems quite an overshot. While I don't think hardcoding the font in the stylesheet is ultimately the way to go, attached is a patch to do that.

There are number of things we could do better here -- have one place to define the font-family and have that cascade everywhere (I don't believe such parent element exists). Also defining only a base size in absolute units (if we're not going to pick it up from the environment's application-font for example as bug #631767 suggests) and then defining the rest in relative % to that size might be a good idea.

Created attachment 176386 [details] [review]
hard coded cantarell for UI. Decrease humongous 16px to a reasonable size.

Created attachment 176398 [details] [review]
scale up the symbolic icons again so they aren't fuzzy

Review of attachment 176398 [details] [review]:

::: data/theme/gnome-shell.css
@@ +148,3 @@
+
+  .popup-menu-icon {
+      icon-size: 1.34em;

This looks dishonest :-)

If you want the icons to be 16px, make them 16px ...

Sure I want them crisp by default. But on the other hand, I wouldn't want to hardcode the size of the icons in absolute units should we chose to support accessible themes for example. Feels like the best solution.

Created attachment 177844 [details] [review]
Hard code Cantarell as the default UI font.

- also shrink the humongous 16px panel and menu size to a reasonable 14.
- scale up the icons to be 16px by default again

Based on a very brief investigation (prompted by a comment on d-d-l), it looks like if you try to use Cantarell with LANG=vi_VN.utf8, you're going to get an ugly mix of Cantarell and DejaVu glyphs. We might want to make the default font name be _()ed, and then just call st_theme_context_set_font(), rather than having it in the CSS.

(In reply to comment #7)
> Based on a very brief investigation (prompted by a comment on d-d-l), it looks
> like if you try to use Cantarell with LANG=vi_VN.utf8, you're going to get an
> ugly mix of Cantarell and DejaVu glyphs. We might want to make the default font
> name be _()ed, and then just call st_theme_context_set_font(), rather than
> having it in the CSS.

The way it is really supposed to work (basically) is that Cantarell should be added to the to of the system sans-serif alias, and we should use sans-serif, and then fontconfig will note that the font doesn't support the locale's font and pick a different lower in the alias.

That's not very feasible in the current jhbuild-gnome environment, but certainly the minimum thing we should try to do is to keep the Cantarell reference in one place using 'stage { font-family: Cantarell, sans-serif; }' and font-size rather than having it throughout the file to make for easy distribution patching.

Comment on attachment 177844 [details] [review]
Hard code Cantarell as the default UI font.

Marking needs work - I don't think we need to take danw's approach at the moment, but the current patch misses a large amount of the UI - message tray, most of the overview, etc. The right approach for now is to set the font family with

 stage {
    font-family: ...;
 }

Then in other places only override what we need with with font-size: and font-weight: rather than respecifying the font family with a font: abbreviation.

Created attachment 178750 [details] [review]
Hard code Cantarell as the default UI font.

- specify an overall font-family for all children of the stage and
  for places where we just want to use a size, use font-size.
- also shrink the humongous 16px panel and menu size to a reasonable 14.
- scale up the icons to be 16px by default again

Based on a patch by Jakub Steiner <jimmac@gmail.com>

Attachment 178750 [details] pushed as 961fdd8 - Hard code Cantarell as the default UI font.