[PD] fonts on GNU/Linux

Frank Barknecht fbar at footils.org
Fri May 18 01:07:12 CEST 2007


Hallo,
Hans-Christoph Steiner hat gesagt: // Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:

> I did a survey of applications on GNOME/Debian, GNOME/Ubuntu, Windows  
> and Mac OS X.  Bold fonts are only used for highlights everywhere  
> that I looked.  

Pd doesn't have different font weights anyway. 

> I think it is important that Pd also follow these  established
> standards, so that's why I went with a normal weight  font.  Max/MSP
> and jMax also use a normal weight font.  So in effect,  I feel I am
> not making this decision, instead I found it quite  difficult to
> continue using a bold font when nothing else did.

The IMO well designed Ableton Live uses bold a lot, most prominently
in their grid boxes. On stage normal weight is not easy to read at
all.

> That is not to discount your issue with the font.  Ideally, each user  
> could set their own font to their needs.  That will take more work,  
> but it's within reach. 

I don't want to force everyone to use the same font weights that I
prefer either. 

But what I don't understand: Why not let the default for now be bold
like in the past years and make normal weight optional for later?

While many people complained about the Courier font sizes, I've never
heard anyone complain about the bold weight. To me it seems dropping
bold is like fixing something that wasn't broken[*], and doing it just
because so far Pd dared to be different from Max, jMax or Gnome IMO is
not convincing enough. That's probably the crucial point where we
disagree.

> One easy thing that might help you is using a bigger font.

Font size is a completely different issue. I don't have a problem with
size 10 in the Pd I'm currently using, and I use 11 normally in xterm
and Vim. (Font size 12 in Pd/Linux is a problem for other reasons as
well, as it takes away too much patching area.)

[*] (I'm ignoring here that pd-extended now is broken for me.)

Ciao
-- 
 Frank Barknecht                 _ ______footils.org_ __goto10.org__




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