Font Common Room
From OLPC
Contents |
[edit] Introduction
Issues about fonts may arise in various places, such as individual country pages.
The font common room is a place where people may raise issues about fonts so that they become noticed by people interested in solving font problems.
See the Fonts page for generic issues about fonts.
[edit] Choice of fonts
[edit] Greek language
For the Greek OLPC we are considering which font to use as the main font for the system. The choice goes towards the direction of the DejaVu fonts as they support modern Greek and they come in three styles; sans serif, serif and monospace. We will probably be adding a few more free Greek fonts, as they are useful when adding styles in Abiword, so that there is some artistic variety.
A concern we have is that of having fully hinted fonts. The existing fonts are partially hinted, so they are almost adequate. The optimal would be to have them fully hinted.
Finally, there is the issue of whether we can activate the bytecode interpreter in fontconfig (makes fonts look nice in smaller sizes). The question is, do these patents by Apple apply in Greece?
How do DejaVu and Gentium compare in practice? First make sure that you have installed both DejaVu and Gentium (installed by default in Ubuntu Linux 6.06). Then, compare DejaVu in several sizes and Gentium in several sizes.
[edit] Useful Tools
There are tools that can be used to edit fonts, modify fonts and convert fonts. Some of this can be done in Python which means that it may be possible to build a font editing application accessible to kids; building on the C library provided by FontForge.
(Email dave@lab6.com if you are interested in writing a font editor in Sugar, based on the python bindings of libfontforge. I have money to pay for such development :-)
[edit] Keyboards and fonts
I work a lot with my mother and sister who are both Key Stage 1 teachers (thats four to seven year olds) here in the United Kingdom. One thing that they constantly complain about is the confusion that is created with inappropriate fonts for young children when they learn to read and write.
In particular you need to pay attention to the letter shapes of a, g, q, 3, 4 and 9. The closest fitting font that is widely available is Comic Sans, but this has no upwards flick on the lower case q and the digit 4 should be like an upper case L with a vertical line through the digit.
- Good point. Since the developers cannot predict where such difficulties could arise with all the different scripts and fonts, perhaps a stripped down version of FontForge could be shipped with the units. At the very least, the deployment process should include a step where native speakers of each target language review the fonts and document where changes could make it clearer for children. In the absence of a corrected font, some e-book lessons on character shapes would go a long way to helping clear up the kids' confusion.
I was showing them photographs of the laptop and explaining what it was all about, which they thought was absolutely brilliant. However the first thing they commented on was that the letters on the keyboard where upper case rather than lower case and even then the letter shapes where all wrong.
The suggestion from my sister was that it would be good if you could have interchangable keys so that they could start off with a lowercase one and then switch to upper case as they progressed. Perhaps not practical, but lower case versions should be available for younger children. You will need to have lots of keyboard variants anyway as US layout won't do in India or China etc. It's the one component you will need to change depending where it is going to be used.
- This is, of course, already planned. By the way, the upper/lower case variation is only found in the Latin/Greek/Cyrillic group of scripts. Most languages do not have this.
- I remembered seeing a thread entitled Font for teachers in the Gallery forum at High-Logic http://forum.high-logic.com so I looked it up and found the AJoanhand font is still available from a link in the http://forum.high-logic.com/viewtopic.php?t=296 thread. It has the q and 4 in the form that you want them to be.
- The main page for High-Logic is http://www.high-logic.com where their products are introduced: these include a fontmaking program.
- What font families do UK Key Stage 1 teachers use with their current Windows and Mac applications? (Perhaps some, like the Jarman ones, can be easily licensed on a large scale. If not, maybe a talented open source font designer could be recruited.)
- Does the National Curriculum (England and Wales) mandate particular shapes for early handwriting and character recognition, or are we referring to conventions that particular schools and counties have adopted (perhaps for consistency from class to class or to reflect research results)? We would need a standard to evaluate latin fonts and proposed improvements against.
- Those Jarman, DN and AJoanhand font looks nice - at least for UK - (in AJoanHand the '1' and '7' may be confused. What is the licensing on it? How acceptable is it worldwide to learners of Latin scripts?
- I recognise the issue because my (English-speaking) three-year-old has not learned to write '4' yet - but he is already good at recognising both common shapes. He does get quite confused by the serifs on numeral '1' however - so I agree that up to at least age 9, purchasers, developers and teachers need to cater for poor character recognition and a preference for lower case (on the keycaps and the screen) and to support and motivate improvements to recognition.
[edit] Towards visually superior fonts
The discussion here reminds me of a short-lived project I undertook most of a decade ago (and dropped before maturity for want of free time), in which I tried to explore principles which might help develop a more legible English alphabetic font. This means working to reduce the confusion of one letter for another, in part by making the letters as "big" as possible for a given stipulated text density. I'm not sure of its relevance here, but it might make some amusing reading for people trying to select a font to use. There were no clinical tests of the utility of any of the specific designs explored. (By the way, someone comfortable with a particular font might be trained to read a very odd one instead by gradually "morphing" from one font to the other in the course of everyday reading, with indiscernable changes each day. This automated font synthesis is something which a computer might do easily and a printed book not!)
- Docdtv 19:32, 31 December 2006 (EST)
