Pleasant Fonts

I just put in firefox the following:

Serif: Adobe Times
Sans-serif: Adobe Helvetica
Monospace: Adobe Courier

Just so, try and error, and not tried to the end.
It is not advertisement for Adobe, but my eyes are now considerably relaxed.

Very important was also to disable antialiased fonts, see:


What is your experience with fonts?
 
I like plasma 5 default fonts for display:
Noto Sans - noto Serif- hack
For Emacs it's adobe source code
For print (latex and LuaMetaTex) libertinus is my favourite font family (formerly Linux Libertine and Linux Biolinum) .
When I have trouble with printing such fonts I convert my text to adobe Garamond pro and Avenir Next (sans font).
 
For Emacs it's adobe source code

I have in Emacs with X11 the default and it is nice:

name (opened by): -adobe-courier-medium-r-normal--17-120-100-100-m-100-iso8859-1
full name: -adobe-courier-medium-r-normal--17-120-100-100-m-100-iso8859-1
size: 17
height: 15
baseline-offset: 0
relative-compose: 0
default-ascent: 0
ascent: 12
descent: 3
average-width: 10
space-width: 10
max-width: 10

See:


 
How are you getting Adobe fonts on your system?

Firefox offers them on "settings". Emacs has adobe courier on default. You can try xfontsel.

I am not an expert on fonts. Perhaps a theme for the forum.

Talking about pleasant fonts is like asking, "What's your favorite color?".

Definitively no. Or in part yes. Would you work on a text editor with red fonts and green background?

As an issue of aesthetics there is a lot of subjectivity, but there is sure objective criteria of what is pleasant.

Most fonts, the blurr anti-aliased fonts, are an insult for my eyes. They are by far much worse than the old German fonts (Fraktur, Schwabacher, Gothic), then with the later at least you get accustomed after reading an amout of text, with the former you get extremely tired after reading a little of text.
 
Color has nothing to do with font selection. And you can find all kinds of fonts that don't anti-alias. But then you are left with a selection of fonts that you may like and I don't which, as I said, now all boils down to personal preference.

I'm waiting for this thread to degenerate into a long list of personal preference suggestions for fonts.
 
More hot takes? Grayscale anti-aliasing doesn't make anything particularly blurry. What you want is a high PPI display in combination with adequate room lighting and proper brightness/contrast settings.
 
What you want is a high PPI display
No, I like my display, it worked till now. It is Windows that demands always more expensive hardware.

I'm waiting for this thread to degenerate into a long list of personal preference suggestions for fonts.

I hope no. I hope people understand the problem. It is a real problem. And the intention of my posting was
to propose a possible solution.
 
I like plasma 5 default fonts for display:
Noto Sans - noto Serif- hack
Chromium does not offer adobe, but these noto.

Noto are horrible, perhaps because I disabled antialiased.

Chromium has as standard DejaVU: serif, sans, sans mono.

Wikipedia looks good / mediocre. Google search horrible. Other pages also horrible.

Perhaps the difference is due to the size, but perhaps the horrible pages select own fonts,
I do not know how to disable that (firefox offer to disable it and use only the customized fonts).

An I have now Idea why firefox, chromium and xfontsel offer different sets of fonts.
 
One thing this thread and others like it point out a couple of important things to me:
Fonts are very personal. What I like you may hate; that's ok.
Your specific environment monitor, lighting, your age all feed into "the best font".
 
"Blurred" fonts are anti-aliased fonts and they are made that way on purpose. It's not a problem. It's an intentional design by the creator. If they don't present well to you then you need to make another choice. an intentional
 
Fonts are very personal. What I like you may hate; that's ok.
No, mer. I insist there is something objective. Of course it may depend on the environment: display resolution,
anti-aliasing disabled, etc.

But if fonts appear in parts very dark as were bold, in parts not so dark, and that is what I described as
horrible above, then it is something objective that it is not OK.

Fact: with FreeBSD you do not get anymore a pleasant X11 out of the box for any computer and display.

And perhaps there are people that are not so sensible to these problems.
 
"Blurred" fonts are anti-aliased fonts and they are made that way on purpose. It's not a problem. It's an intentional design by the creator. If they don't present well to you then you need to make another choice. an intentional
You can google for: anti-aliased strain. You will see that it is not only for me a problem. A real problem. Well,
a problem on purpose. As I said, an insult to my eyes.
 
No, mer. I insist there is something objective.
If one is limited to "good or bad" fonts. Within that there are can be a range of different fonts, then personal preference comes in. Droid Sans vs DejaVu Sans vs Noto Sans. Objectively I consider them all to be good based on my definition of good: readable at the sizes I need on the equipment I use. But I think Noto is better than Droid; I don't hate Droid, but there may be some people that do.

That's all I was saying.

I think we'd all probably agree that objectively, Comic Sans is a bad font, regardless of equipment. ;)
 
How are you getting Adobe fonts on your system?
Good question.

Chrome does not offer adobe fonts, no times, no helvetica, no courier.

It seems it takes fonts from /usr/local/share/fonts. There you find times, helvetica and courier
under the subdirectories 100dpi, 75dpi, but compressed.

From where do get firefox the fonts? Perhaps firefox reads compressed files, but chromium not?

The answer seems to be yes, try: fc-list | grep Adobe | less
 
the troublesome font-family is:

Helvetica

… This morning I removed the 70-yes-bitmaps.conf symbolic link from /usr/local/etc/fonts/conf.d, reboot -r, things remain good, touch wood.

FreeBSD Forums and e.g. <https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/pull/590> appear OK when site fonts are allowed ☑

… Sans-serif: Adobe Helvetica … What is your experience with fonts?

If I prefer Adobe Helvetica in Firefox, then it becomes necessary to recreate the symlink.

Code:
% file /usr/local/etc/fonts/conf.d/70-no-bitmaps.conf 
/usr/local/etc/fonts/conf.d/70-no-bitmaps.conf: symbolic link to ../conf.avail/70-no-bitmaps.conf
%

I prefer the Firefox defaults, and sanserif for proportional.
 
I won't read back over all this but want to point out, again, that Helvetica, and probably others listed above, are not free fonts and not installed on systems or browsers by default so might not even be available.
 

Nice, however there's no Helvetica in the collection:

Code:
% pkg info --list x11-fonts/webfonts
webfonts-0.30_14:
        /usr/local/share/doc/webfonts/LICENSE
        /usr/local/share/fonts/webfonts/andalemo.ttf
        /usr/local/share/fonts/webfonts/arial.ttf
        /usr/local/share/fonts/webfonts/arialbd.ttf
        /usr/local/share/fonts/webfonts/arialbi.ttf
        /usr/local/share/fonts/webfonts/ariali.ttf
        /usr/local/share/fonts/webfonts/ariblk.ttf
        /usr/local/share/fonts/webfonts/comic.ttf
        /usr/local/share/fonts/webfonts/comicbd.ttf
        /usr/local/share/fonts/webfonts/cour.ttf
        /usr/local/share/fonts/webfonts/courbd.ttf
        /usr/local/share/fonts/webfonts/courbi.ttf
        /usr/local/share/fonts/webfonts/couri.ttf
        /usr/local/share/fonts/webfonts/georgia.ttf
        /usr/local/share/fonts/webfonts/georgiab.ttf
        /usr/local/share/fonts/webfonts/georgiai.ttf
        /usr/local/share/fonts/webfonts/georgiaz.ttf
        /usr/local/share/fonts/webfonts/impact.ttf
        /usr/local/share/fonts/webfonts/times.ttf
        /usr/local/share/fonts/webfonts/timesbd.ttf
        /usr/local/share/fonts/webfonts/timesbi.ttf
        /usr/local/share/fonts/webfonts/timesi.ttf
        /usr/local/share/fonts/webfonts/trebuc.ttf
        /usr/local/share/fonts/webfonts/trebucbd.ttf
        /usr/local/share/fonts/webfonts/trebucbi.ttf
        /usr/local/share/fonts/webfonts/trebucit.ttf
        /usr/local/share/fonts/webfonts/verdana.ttf
        /usr/local/share/fonts/webfonts/verdanab.ttf
        /usr/local/share/fonts/webfonts/verdanai.ttf
        /usr/local/share/fonts/webfonts/verdanaz.ttf
        /usr/local/share/fonts/webfonts/webdings.ttf
        /usr/local/share/licenses/webfonts-0.30_14/EULA
        /usr/local/share/licenses/webfonts-0.30_14/LICENSE
        /usr/local/share/licenses/webfonts-0.30_14/catalog.mk
%



Serif: Adobe Times
Sans-serif: Adobe Helvetica
Monospace: Adobe Courier

… my eyes are now considerably relaxed. …

Code:
% pkg info -x adobe
font-adobe-100dpi-1.0.3_4
font-adobe-75dpi-1.0.3_4
font-adobe-utopia-100dpi-1.0.4_4
font-adobe-utopia-75dpi-1.0.4_4
font-adobe-utopia-type1-1.0.4_4
%

pkg info --list font-adobe-100dpi <https://dpaste.com/HRNFDBT4J>
 
?

… Or perhaps just on /usr/local/share/fonts/75dpi and 100dpi

From the paste in my previous post:

/usr/local/share/licenses/font-adobe-100dpi-1.0.3_4/LICENSE
/usr/local/share/licenses/font-adobe-100dpi-1.0.3_4/MIT

Code:
% cat /usr/local/share/licenses/font-adobe-100dpi-1.0.3_4/LICENSE
This package has a single license: MIT (MIT license / X11 license).
% cat /usr/local/share/licenses/font-adobe-100dpi-1.0.3_4/MIT
Copyright 1984-1989, 1994 Adobe Systems Incorporated.
Copyright 1988, 1994 Digital Equipment Corporation.

Adobe is a trademark of Adobe Systems Incorporated which may be
registered in certain jurisdictions.
Permission to use these trademarks is hereby granted only in
association with the images described in this file.

Permission to use, copy, modify, distribute and sell this software
and its documentation for any purpose and without fee is hereby
granted, provided that the above copyright notices appear in all
copies and that both those copyright notices and this permission
notice appear in supporting documentation, and that the names of
Adobe Systems and Digital Equipment Corporation not be used in
advertising or publicity pertaining to distribution of the software
without specific, written prior permission.  Adobe Systems and
Digital Equipment Corporation make no representations about the
suitability of this software for any purpose.  It is provided "as
is" without express or implied warranty.
%
 
Yeah, Adobe fonts are really nice.
They are a very good first choice if you quickly want select readable fonts without putting much effort in this topic.
I use the courier style for the shell and Vim.
Particulary for the use with a texteditor I only chose fonts where every character can be easily, clearly and undoubtfuly be distinguished from others.
Especially for coding I have no use for fonts where you need always a second closer look to not mix up O and 0, I and l, the brackets or so...
But of course there are many, many other very good fonts. There are also many websites, where you can buy additional fonts (or even get free ones), and maybe a couple of bucks could bring your favorite font on the screen; this just as a hint for you don't need to stick with the ones given by ports or pkg, which already provide way more than enough for the daily use (hard to imagine not find a very good usable one within them.)
As far as I grappled with this topic I daresay FreeBSD and X combined are capable to implement nearly all types of standard font formats - so it's just a question of requirement and effort to chose your perfect fonts. (And how to implement which, where... -> The handbook dedicates this topic not for no reason.)

Perhaps a theme for the forum.
...LARGE topic.

I doubt it would be a good idea to start a discussion about it as a forum's thread, because not every font is suitable for every purpose - which font would be usable for you for what needs....
It also depends on the monitor (pixelshape and space) and the resolution you're using, your position and distance to the screen, if you's wearing glasses... also your monitor's contrast settings make a difference for the viewability/readability of videos/text/...

Besides that there is much more potential for collisions of personal tastes as about proficieny about what it's really all about in the end:
typesetting, readability of texts

You may start with fixed size and truetype fonts, which are not the only two categories you only need to distinguish fonts within the aspect of pure technical usage (terminal vs. desktop.)
You're also not done with distinguishing serif from sans-serif fonts. I'll bet at the latest then an emotional argument starts, because most today's users distinguish serif as "old fashioned = yuk!" and sans-serif as "cool, modern = must do", not aware of the fact that the serifs are created to increase readability of large texts, and sans-serif fonts are ment for headlines or narrow column's texts. (Just because anything is done a billion times wrong doesn't make it right.)
Somebody who's reading much is aware of reading longer textes set in sans-serif fonts is way more weary, tidying as reading the same in serif fonts.
Anybody saying "no, that's not true!" is not proving the opposite, but not reading much, really. ?

Typesetting including fonts is a real craftmanship developed over centuries, almost destroyed in less than 25 years by wordprocessors (MS Word, LibreOffice Writer, etc).
The user's very first attention and too much attendant effort while working with it is used up into typesetting instead of concentrating on writing the text first and format it afterwards, thus lowering both productivity and quality of either.
Plus: MS Word and LibreOffice Writer etc. overstrain users with typesetting possibilties such as hundreds of fonts, sizes, colors.... nobody needs, nobody wants to see.
(Not every writer thinks about his readers. But writing a text for nobody to read is pointless.)
Plus: MS Word and LibreOffice Writer etc. are not even capable of producing a single barely usable typesetting anyhow.
Plus: Most users don't know shit about typesetting at all, but being forced to do it as the very first task at all, even without a single character written yet and without being told anything about typesetting at all... ?
Thus ending up in the armageddon of typesetting we observe today.
There actually are publishers not ashamed of themselves trying to sell books written completely in sans-serif without justified margins... un-freakin..!!1!!eleven!!!:rude:

...and not a few will disagree while not actually being even aware of what I'm talking about or where the actual problem really is... ?‍?

Tip:
You may find Allin Cottrell's essay "Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient" as pdf if you duckduckgoing4it.
It's really readable and very revealing.

For those who did not recognized it:
I emphasize what hroudr presumably initially ment to say:
"It's a good idea not to stick with the preconfigured fonts but to chose a good readable font, increasing the readability of text."
 
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