Re: [DejaVu-fonts] ARe: Greek theta characters look almost the same

[Ben L. <ben...@gm...>]

On Monday 29 September 2014 20:08:37 Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> On Tue, 30 Sep 2014 01:41:18 +0200 Ben Laenen <ben...@gm...>
> > OS X should use it, don't know if Emacs uses it, I'm not an OS X
> > user, other people could help me there if they're reading. But
> > there's a simple test. Set the font to DejaVu Sans, and paste these
> > four characters in Emacs and let me know what you see: "",
> > maybe post a screenshot.
> 
> What *should* I see? I get three characters from the custom use area,
> an apple, an fi ligature, an fl ligature, and something that looks
> like two seven segment display 8s.

These are special glyphs in DejaVu Sans that were made to help us debugging 
the hinting. You're sure you've changed the font to Sans instead of Mono, as 
there shouldn't be any character replacement happening. Only the 88 you see is 
from Sans.

These special characters change shape with the hinting and should show you the 
pixel size that it's being rendered at, so if you pick a larger font size, the 
number goes up. If you're seeing "88" then there was no hinting applied. So 
since you have one "88" in there, I can assume truetype hinting is disabled 
for you.

If you'd have hinting enabled, the uppercase and lowercase would be easier to 
distinguish and it wouldn't all be blurry in the middle.

> Fine, but this in no way is incompatible with the design of the
> typeface. It is, in fact, more in keeping with the design, and
> regardless, the most important feature of a typeface is that it be
> *usable*. That's why, even though it is not traditional, most
> typefaces used for purposes like this dot or slash the zero glyph.
> You will find narry a dotted or slashed zero glyph in typography
> before computers, and yet, DejaVu Sans slashes the 0.

Sans doesn't slash the zero, Mono puts a dot in the middle.

> I note you deleted the rest of what I had to say without responding
> directly, so let me repeat it.

I tend to remove quotes to keep things shorter and so that other readers don't 
have to look for where the replies are in between all the quotes. That doesn't 
mean I didn't read it.

> I noted that your claim that accentuating the center bar would make
> this a non sans-serif typeface is untrue, as that feature is not a
> serif and is present in some (though not all!) Greek-only sans serif
> designs.

Sure, they exist, but even if I'd think it wouldn't clash with the overall 
design, there's just no room in the glyph to comfortably put the serifs on the 
horizontal bar in Mono (and I even just tried it out).

> I also noted that you need not increase the width of the font to
> increase the rounding of the capital theta.
>
> (...)

I see you didn't understand the part where I said that changing these curves 
will mean that they don't fit in with the other letters and they'd need to 
change as well as a result, at which point we're redesigning the entire font. 
There are certain typographic rules and you can't individually change the 
shape of some curves in some characters while ignoring how the glyph fits into 
the rest of the typeface.

It doesn't look like I'm going to convince you, so we'll have to disagree on 
this. But the theta in DejaVu will stay as it is.

Greetings
Ben