[sugar] Royal National Institute for the Blind low-vision fonts now under GPL v3 - use in OLPC?

Albert Cahalan acahalan at gmail.com
Wed Nov 28 02:01:04 EST 2007


Woah, hold on a second...

These fonts have terrible coverage. Not even Latin-1 is covered.
You get 80 of the 96 characters in the 0x00a0 to 0x00ff range.

Furthermore, are the fonts actually good for what is claimed?
Remember that they may be optimized for low-res screens without
anti-aliasing. These fonts are old.

Probably is most useful thing to do for low vision is to simply
increase the text size. A magnifier may be a better solution
for some users and some circumstances.

All users will be better off if they have multiple choices
available. Not everybody will agree on the "best" font.

These are fairly readable and have good coverage:

http://scripts.sil.org/CharisSILfont
http://scripts.sil.org/Gentium
http://junicode.sourceforge.net/

SIL also has a prototype font called Andika. Variant F is nice.
It's not yet hinted, but that might be perfectly OK at 200 DPI.



More information about the Devel mailing list