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

[Ed Trager]

Albert Cahalan mentioned SIL Andika.  I would like to elaborate a bit
for those unfamiliar with this font.
SIL's Andika font is specifically designed for literacy.  Here's what SIL says:

" 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 easily confused with
one another. "

Released under SIL's Open Font License, this font should most
definitely be near the
top of the list of fonts installed on the XO.  While the font and its
variants are still under
review, they are already quite usable and have extensive glyph
complements, although
not yet as extensive as in SIL Gentium or SIL Charis.

On Nov 28, 2007 2:01 AM, Albert Cahalan <acahalan at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
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