Hi,
I think I had seen somewhere on one of the wiki pages, a specific
recommendation for a font for print, was is not Vegur?
"Vegur" is used for the logo, but the kerning had to be adapted etc
for it. It is far from ready to become an interface or printing font
as it lacks glyph coverage (even relatively basic latin symbols like
á, ä etc. do not work and is badly kerned. It still is at the begin of
its development.
The fonts that print best and look best on screen without subpixel
hinting are unfortunately all Microsoft fonts (Arial, Tahoma, Verdana
etc.)—they put lots of money in their fonts and even if find the
shapes themselves of all of these fonts (except for Georgia and
Sylfaen) pretty awful, the effort Microsoft put in the fonts shows.
I just checked on my system (Mageia 1 -> a Mandriva fork), FreeSans is
not installed. How is the Liberation font family for print?
That's odd. There's probably a package, but still...
I don't like Liberation Sans to much, because instead of being a
Helvetica clone, it mimics Arial (which itself only mimics Helvetica)
and shares some ugliness with it. I admit, this is font geekery and
probably not very interesting to you. So, yes, it is usable as an
interface and also as a printing font.
Anyway, what I meant when I spoke about printing was, how well
screenshots with a certain hinting/anti-aliasing print (anti-aliasing
basically means smoothing via grey pixels at round parts of a glyph
or, nowadays, parts of neighbouring colour cells [1]).
If you leave sub-pixel rendering while taking screenshots, the
screenshots will print with odd colour artefacts (see image 4 on the
right side of [1]). Using grey-only antialiasing prevents this but
looks noticeably worse on screen.
Also note, that it's very easy to have bad font hinting on free
systems (hinting is the process in which font outlines are subtly
manipulated to fit certain rasters at smaller sizes), because hinting
using the hints that a font itself provides [2] is a patented
technique and is therefore usually disabled on Linux systems.
It's relatively easy on the other hand to disable hinting completely
and have slightly fuzzy but truer to form fonts. To do this, click on
"Details" in the Gnome appearance panel and choose either "Greyscale"
smoothing or "Sub-pixel rendering" (for day-to-day stuff, use subpixel
rendering, for screenshots "greyscale") and then choose "None" under
"Hinting".
You can find them all here:
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/DE/Doku/Allgemein/Screenshots
I also made those screenshots under Mageia 1, I didn't set a specific font.
It just says "Sans"
or "Sans Bold". For one set of screenshots I changed from a 10 point font to
12 points, to see
how this would look like. For the font rendering I chose "Best contrast"
inspite of me having a
flatscreen monitor.
"Sans" is an alias for "Deja Vu Sans" on almost an Linux system today.
"Serif" usually is the alias for "Deja Vu Serif". Now, another
personal thing: I don't like this font (that is, the sans-serif
version, the serif one is okay, just not for interfaces).
Sorry for blabbering this much about fonts.
Astron.
[1] see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font_rasterization
[2] as opposed to the font engine determining entirely on it's own how to hint