Fonts

[belovedmonster]

Not strictly artwork, but I think Mint could further improve its visual presentation by carefully selecting a nicer default font. As someone who owns a Mac, one of the most immediate things you notice is how much nicer all the text looks than both Windows and Linux. It is a subtle thing, but it makes using the system so much nicer as a result.

Personally on my own Linux box I switched to the Droid family of fonts after seeing a bunch of people with really nice desktops using it. The Droid set of fonts were created by Google for use on the Android platform so they are top notch. You can install them the buntu repos. (Tutorial here).

I'm not necessarily saying we should go with Driod, but just opening up the discussion. ... Could we not make Mint look nicer by switching fonts?

[rich_roast]

I must be some sort of philistine, not being able to see very much difference at all between droid and the standard fonts; don't get me wrong, there is a visible difference, but personally I had to go looking for it.

Good discussion to open up, though, see if there's enough people who'd like this choice made available to them rather than have to find the font, install and configure it. As a philistine, I'd certainly have no objection to their presence any more than their absence, and if it made friends think that my OS looks nicer, even if I don't notice the difference, then so much the better.

[belovedmonster]

don't get me wrong, there is a visible difference, but personally I had to go looking for it.

To be fair, I think if the font looks radically different we are switching to something too 'out there'. Go look at the difference between Arial and Helvetica and it is ever so subtle, but Helvetica is often voted the greatest font of all time and Arial is seen as a butt ugly knock off that no designer would ever consider using.

[rich_roast]

Smiling as I took up the challenge I stumbled when I found that I could find neither Arial nor Helvetica installed on my system, so I went crying to Google who looked at me with her sad, sad eyes and pointed to this.

Perhaps my insensitivity to differences between these fonts is borne from my training as a palaeographer; I am more accustomed to very distinct (to my eyes) traits in handwritten scripts. The extremely fine differences in fonts designed for use on computers seems almost entirely inconsequential to me; but it may be a different matter to someone with training in web design or similar. I agree with the "knock-off" argument, but that doesn't mean that arial is in any way an "ugly" font to my eyes. Again, personally "meh", but part of the reason I'm posting this reply is to bump the topic and see if anyone else thinks that the original suggestion is a good'un.

[DrHu]

http://new.myfonts.com/fonts/bitstream/ ... o/?addtags
http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/fonts/X ... fonts.html
http://www.elfring.com/micrlj.htm
http://www.cs.brown.edu/system/software ... /guide.pdf
http://www.fxguide.com/modules.php?name ... int&id=275
I don't know: Font preferences is just that, a preference

I don't see many people being that interested in typography to be concerned about font styles, whether in Linux, Apple OS-X or Windows OS

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_PostScript
http://www.eink.com/
If we were we might all prefer something like display postscript or the Digital Ink e book readers
--it seems as long as it is readable, it is good enough for most.

[ESM]

I use droid 9 points, and it looks awesome.