Font selection

[pdattx]

These both ligatures-elements in the text (with the libertine-font) aren't helpful - more confusing

[alerque]

First of all, those aren't ligatures, they are stylistic alternative glyph sets. There are ligature options in the font too but I don't think any of the current selections are out of line with most modern language usage.

As for the stylistic glyphs, whether or not they are confusing is really a matter of personal preference and it is heavily impacted by culture. As it is neither the default font for the app nor the only serif option, I would argue that the main purpose of this font is two-fold: be able to use the same font family across languages (the other alternatives are a bit rocky when switching alphabets) and to add just a little bit of old-school flair to the text. I have, for example, gotten great feedback on the use of that font to typeset the Bible in Turkish. People often ask me what the font is and are disappointed to find out they can't use it in their own desktop publishing because their word processors don't support selecting the alternate glyphs.

Is the libertine font helpful to your usage in a way that the other font options are not able to match?

[pdattx]

Thank you for the feedback. I see, that was probably the wrong approach.

In my experience there are only 2 font-favorites: serif and sans-serif. Two fonts would therefore suffice, or? If I compare this with other services: bibelserver.com has one, bible.com has four (two similar).

My favorite for the serif font is URW Garamond No. 8 (http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/urw/garamond/). I believe this is even better (read-friendly and better typeface) as Georgia and CharisSIL.

What do you think?

[johndyer]

Another option is Google's new Noto font:
https://www.google.com/get/noto/#/

JD

On Mar 19, 2015, at 3:10 AM, pdattx notifications@github.com wrote:

Thank you for the feedback. I see, that was probably the wrong approach.

In my experience there are only 2 font-favorites: serif and sans-serif. Two fonts would therefore suffice, or? If I compare this with other services: bibelserver.com has one, bible.com has four (two similar).

My favorite for the serif font is URW Garamond No. 8 (http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/urw/garamond/). I believe this is even better (read-friendly and better typeface) as Georgia and CharisSIL.

What do you think?

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[pdattx]

I compared the noto with the charis:

NOTO SERIF
rarely, if then short irregularities in thickness:
+ Overall appearance
- Good readability

2400 glyphs:
+ International use

CHARIS SIL
aware of irregularities in thickness:
- Overall appearance
+ Good readability

about 3600 glyphs:
++ International use

---

That is only a short list of som key data but I prefer the Charis in this comparison for the stronger character.

A good serif only unfolds when it is relatively large - if there is no space anyway recommended that a sans-serif font.

That brings me to the question: How important is the international representation of a font?

[pdattx]

Mhhh, I think we can delete this pull request.
Although the font-setting of the "libertine" is in the german language a problem, it seems to be important for other languages.

[alerque]

For reference @pdattx please also see the discussion when this was first added in #25. Sorry some of that is about technical issues with the merge, but there is some discussion of font choices and related issues in there. For that matter #26 has a couple notes about font and layout preferences and how many choices there should be.

[Nilpo]

Another option is Google's new Noto font:

When I looked at this for another biblical languages project, Noto was lacking some key glyphs for use with Biblical Hebrew and Greek and had some problems with Hebrew vowel points.

If you're looking for a single font with good glyph support, open licensing, and is web-embeddable then Cardo is the best bet.

I've done some pretty extensive testing that I'm planning on releasing in a different repo.