<div class="gmail_quote">2010/1/31 Albert Cahalan <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:acahalan@gmail.com">acahalan@gmail.com</a>></span><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
Sayamindu Dasgupta writes:<br>
<br>
> It may make sense to allow setting of the font as well. While the<br>
> default "Sans" may be good enough for most European scripts, it may<br>
> cause problems for Arabic, Asian, South Asian scripts, etc. "Sans"<br>
> usually resolves to DejaVu Sans, etc, which often carry suboptimal<br>
> glyphs from non Latin scripts<br>
<br>
I think it's only fair that you get suboptimal glyphs too. :-)<br>
<br>
DejaVu Sans looks bad even for English with plain ASCII. Among other<br>
things, somebody invented a screwy non-standard way to distinguish the<br>
lowercase L ("l") character. That sort of "innovation" just isn't what<br>
you do in a system-wide default font. The rest is messed up too.<br>
<br>
BTW, consider a document containing several languages. You'd normally<br>
want all the Latin-based ones to use one font, all the Cyrillic ones to<br>
use one font, and so on. In other words, per-script (not per-language)<br>
selection of the font. If I remember right, there are about 14 scripts<br>
in active use around the world.<br><br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>I thought that Gentium may have a sans serif typeface. No, but they refer to Andika SIL : "Andika is a sans serif, Unicode-compliant font designed especially for literacy use, taking into account the needs of beginning readers. The focus is on clear, easy-to-perceive letterforms that will not be readily confused with one another."</div>
<div><br></div><div>Seems to fit the bill very well. It is released under an open font licence, however I remember hearing difficulties with typeface licencing & GPL. Here's a link: <a href="http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scrIpts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=Andika">http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scrIpts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=Andika</a></div>
<div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Tim McNamara</div><div>Identi.ca / Twitter: @timClicks</div><div><br></div><div> </div></div><br>