Contributor nivus

I recently switched to linux mint, I must say it is very nice and based on gutsy 7.10.

They use the red hat liberation fonts by default and OMG It looks amazing.


The default ubuntu fonts are painful to look at once you know how good it can look.


https://www.redhat.com/promo/fonts/

Ubuntu should include a way to add/remove fonts from a repository just like the add/remove program panel. When a user needs a new font, they could open up the window, and the program would download the latest repository fonts. The user could look through the fonts and choose which ones to install by simply checking a box and clicking "apply." A user could search for font keywords to find certain styles of fonts. For example, someone could search for keywords words "serif","sans serif","cursive", and the GUI would display fonts that match the search. This would be a killer tool for designers.

Furthermore, the GUI could be very helpful. When a user browses a font, a sample image of it could be automatically loaded so that the user can quickly find fonts that are appealing to them. A rating system or popularity gauge could be used so that the best fonts can be highlighted.

A tool like this would create inscentive for font designers to make their designs free/public. Credits could be given to designers in the font descriptions.

The default fonts in linux are ugly especially with LCD monitors.The Windows Vista have beautiful Segoe UI font for LCDs. It will be great to create new linux font for universal use.

At the moment Ubuntu uses DejaVu Sans Book as the default UI font. Although DejaVu really looks great, it wasn't built to be a an interface font which is very apparent when comparing the letter widths with those of real UI fonts.

http://img514.imageshack.us/my.php?image=fontcomparisonzu7.png

Verdana: Isn't used anywhere as the default UI font afaik.
DejaVu Sans Book: Almost identical to Verdana, used in Ubuntu.
Lucida Sans: UI font on Macs.
DejaVu Sans Condensed: An interesting alternative for Ubuntu?
Trebuchet MS: Used in the title bars of Windows.
Droid: Used in mobile phones with the Android SDK. An interesting alternative for Ubuntu?
Arial (and it's copies Liberation Sans and Free Sans) are quite popular, but not used as UI fonts.
Tahoma: Used as the default UI font on Win 2000, XP and 2003. What's remarkable is that it is the font with absolutely smallest width of the whole list.

In my opinion it is absolutely striking that no vendor uses such a "wide" font for UIs. Even if we choose the condensed variant we are still on the top half of the list.

Droid looks much better than both Tahoma and Lucida when rendered on Linux which might fix the problem of people trying to "emulate" their Windows/MacOSX rendering on Linux.
Therefore I propose to evaluate alternatives for "application font" which can give ubuntu a more polished look:

- Droid Sans
- DejaVu Sans Condensed

Thanks for your time!


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I would love to have a tool that lets me create a "template" for creating a new user. The tool should allow me to tweak various settings (theme, fonts, background, session preferences, Nautilus preferences, Firefox settings, etc.), and then save this as a template so that I can create multiple users from this. I'd also like to be able to save this template on a USB drive and then import it when I install Ubuntu on a new computer or when I reinstall it on my old computer.