Re: A11y woes
- From: Simos Xenitellis <simos74 gmx net>
- To: Clytie Siddall <clytie riverland net au>
- Cc: gnome-doc-list gnome org
- Subject: Re: A11y woes
- Date: Sun, 19 Feb 2006 13:06:32 +0000
O/H Clytie Siddall έγραψε:
On 19/02/2006, at 10:58 PM, Don Scorgie wrote:
1. Fonts
I've added a little about the "Fixed width font" and "Document font" so
far. However, I don't really know what they're actually used for :( So,
are these descriptions even vaguely related to reality:
Document font: font to use for displaying documents.
Fixed Width font: font to use for editing documents.
I can contribute a little here.
Variable-width fonts, which I hope the 'document fonts" are, are
reading fonts. However accustomed we might become to reading terminal
text, variable-width fonts lead the eye more effectively. (Serif also
comes into this, for body text.) More specifically, accented languages
look terrible in fixed-width fonts. (I was recently unable to start
using an application I would have found very useful, because it didn't
support variable-width fonts, and I can't edit for long in Vietnamese
in fixed-width.)
True Unicode variable width fonts include: Lucida Grande, Arial,
Gentium, Junicode, Titus Cyberbit Basic, and fonts created by language
groups for Unicode (I have some beautiful fonts created for
Vietnamese, but they cover the whole Unicode set.)
Gentium is distributed under the Open Font License
(http://scripts.sil.org/OFL), meaning that it is free and can be
included in Linux distrubutions.
Titus Cyberbit Basic has been derived from a Bitstream font and licensed
from Bitstream (the company). I contacted the institute behind Titus
Cyberbit Basic in case they can re-release the font with an open
license; they said they are bound by the license from Bitstream. Titus
Cyberbit Basic was specially created to support many languages. Due to
the license, it cannot be included by default in distributions.
There is a new font, Dejavu, derived from Bitstream Vera, that offers
Sans, Serif and Monospace (fixed) versions, and this one appears to get
distributed by default in distributions. For example, the new Ubuntu is
using this font by default. Dejavu has support for the Latin Extended
Unicode range, so it should have glyphs for Vietnamese as well.
For the fonts that appear by default in GNOME, there is a file that
determines what's going on. As you may have several fonts that support
Vietnamese, which one does GNOME choose to display text?
The file is /etc/fonts/fonts.conf and it defines a list of font
preferences to go through in order to find glyphs for your language.
Therefore, to have your prefered font actually used, its position in the
preference list should be such that the proper glyphs get used.
Simos
Fixed-width fonts are used for code, numbers, some types of tabular
display and ASCII art ;). They make it easier to distinguish
individual letters, and columns of letters. They are not for fluent
reading, reading of sentences, paragraphs etc. You do get accustomed
to them, to some extent, if you edit a lot in the terminal, but they
are are harder to scan through, particularly for very ill/disabled
people like me.
The only true Unicode fixed-width font of which I know is Everson Mono.
I hope this is useful.
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