GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 647020
Default fonts with non-latin letters look ugly
Last modified: 2011-11-08 07:18:00 UTC
This is obvious bug, glyphs have different size and density and average color. Though i read this topic here http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2011-January/msg00157.html i think the decision made is wrong. Since default font settings can not be used by big part of the community one should either change default settings or provide easy user-friendly access to change this setting. Since GnomeTweakTool is not an official part of default Gnome Live image yet, this is a bug.
This sounds like a bug in assembling your GNOME installation to me - things are supposed to be set up so that Cantarell is only used if it supports your primary language. Certainly we'd need a screenshot and information about how you built or obtained GNOME to be able to comment intelligently.
Created attachment 185425 [details] non-cyrillic fonts look different
> Certainly we'd need a screenshot and information about how you built or obtained GNOME to be able to comment intelligently. Sorry for that. So I use Fedora Live TC1 Beta. And my system locale is en_US.UTF-8. I attached a screen with Firefox titles, Overview-mode title and Pidgin contact window. (In Empathy it looks the same.) Most annoying are fonts in Pidgin or Empathy conversations. Mixture of latin nicknames, commands and so on with cyrillic words which are twice bigger is unexceptable. P.S. I do like these Cantarell fonts for English texts, they look great, but it is just not good to use them as a system-wide default.
(In reply to comment #3) > Sorry for that. So I use Fedora Live TC1 Beta. And my system locale is > en_US.UTF-8. Ah, so you get Cantarell for Latin text, because your locale is en_US, and Cantarell fully supports en_US. The fact that it doesn't match the available Russian fonts is irrelevant, since the system has no way of knowing that you're planning to look at lots of Russian text. (In reply to comment #0) > Since default font settings can not be used by big part of the community one > should either change default settings or provide easy user-friendly access to > change this setting. -> gnome-control-center
> you get Cantarell for Latin text, because your locale is en_US, and Cantarell fully supports en_US You could ask the community, linux people use mostly en_US-locale even if they normally speak other language. There is no correlation between these to parameters and there is no reason to think that support for other languages is not needed in en_US. -> gnome-control-center Maybe one can put a switch somewhere in Regional settings tab. We don't need the whole fonts customization menus there as gnome-tweak-tool provides, but only button to switch to predefined international fonts scheme.
Adding configuration options isn't the way to fix this. Your fonts probably look bad because fontconfig isn't selecting the right font. Either report this to your distribution, or contact the fontconfig list if you put this together yourself. I really don't see anything for the control-center to fix, or provide here.
Ok. Just for the reference, i filed a bug here in RedHat BZ https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=695405
(In reply to comment #6) > Adding configuration options isn't the way to fix this. > > Your fonts probably look bad because fontconfig isn't selecting the right font. But I think it's quite reasonable for us as upstream to give guidance for how we expect this to work when deploying 3.0. So as far as I understand this, what Owen is saying from comment #1 is that if you were logging in in a Russian (or other non-Cantarell-covered language), since most of the GNOME user interface is translated into Russian, we'd expect you to get Deja Vu (or whatever the OS vendor uses). However, even if logging into Russian, that doesn't affect cases where the two languages are mixed. Like in the Empathy Buddy List, groups are not translated, so it's easily possible to get English groups in a list with Russian, as we see in the screenshot. This kind of thing has been pretty much the norm for most Asian users; Deja Vu though had coverage of Cyrillic and Greek, which is your case - so effectively what this bug is about is the switch to Cantarell created a visual regression. Right? Now, all that spelled out, what is it exactly that you were suggesting to tweak? You wanted to switch the GNOME interface font to Deja Vu? (Or perhaps just "Sans", i.e. whatever the OS vendor's fontconfig configuration is?).
> Now, all that spelled out, what is it exactly that you were suggesting to tweak? You wanted to switch the GNOME interface font to Deja Vu? After reading the comments above, I had the following idea in mind: There are different default font schemes in Gnome 3. If you choose the En locale, you have scheme number one with Cantarell font included, and if you choose Ru locale you have scheme number 2 (probably based on Deja-Vu or Liberation) which is better for non-latin texts. Since many users use En locale but want to read non-latin texts, I asked for a switch which could enable font scheme number 2. And the best place for this switch is Regional settings tab, because if user used to read non-english texts he adds the specific keyboard layout also. But Bastien Nocera's comment confused me completely, and now I don't understand how font schemes work and how it is connected to Fedora packaging and font-config question. So I did the only thing I could - filed a bug in RHBZ.
Obvious decision is to add Cyrillic glyphs to Cantarell font, and so avoid mixing it with DejaVu. What kind of help is needed for this? I can provide raster image with the Cyrillic glyphs as I see them in Cantarell, if it will be helpful. Also many glyphs are very similar or the same, like 'A', 'O', 'C'. I can also assemble the list of them.