Comments by "Michael Wright" (@michaelwright2986) on "GNOME 47 Opts For An Interesting Change In Design" video.

  1. 6:00 A Linux guy who does not know the interrobang?! It's kind of half a joke, but there are occasions when it is rhetorically effective.
    1
  2. 14:20 Psychopath. Are you suggesting that Gnome should adopt Reiser Sans as the default? All the font minutiae are real, but often in quite compartmentalised use cases. Actual dead-tree printing has had over 500 years of this, and for a book I'm not sure there's anything much better than the font Nicolas Jensen designed in Venice in the second half of the fifteenth century: but it looks pretty crap on a computer screen. Also, it's not obvious that different alphabets should belong to the same font family, though it is clear that one should pay some attention to how a particular Arabic or Hebrew or Georgian script looks alongside a particular Latin face. Each of them has their own tradition of calligraphy and type design, quite separate from the Latin tradition, so there's no a priori reason why they should belong together in the same act of design. Which means that wanting to have one font to rule them all is likely to introduce complications which could be avoided by accepting that a system could have a variety of fonts available, even for the default display fault, depending on default language. Possibly even a different font for languages using the Latin alphabet with a lot of diacritics. One thing I find troubling in the discussion is that there is no mention of readability studies. There are the obvious abominations like I and l being indistinguishable (as in the font I see on YouTube now), and my pet hate of l being hard to distinguish from i in some quite fashionable fonts; and then there's telling the difference between rn and m, which is unnecessarily hard in some sans serif faces. But there have been more general studies, taking into account different levels of visual acuity and stuff. BTW, making a Bold by just tweaking some parameters on a base font is, I think, regarded as devil's work by font designers. Even scaling by point size can be usefully tweaked, if your aiming for the font beautiful. A distro using a clone of Comic Sans? To go alongside Hannah Montana OS ?!
    1