Noto fonts screw my system, please stop forcing fonts upon me!

[Jens Reuterberg]

Hello,
concerning fonts - the choice of fonts is always a tricky call. Aside from an 
exact, and more feature complete version of Oxygen which sadly doesn't exist, 
Noto is the perfect choice for us.

It's a very well made standardized font and the only other contender was the 
Firefox Fira IIRC and that had other issues (as in being to visually tied to 
Firefox and Mozilla where as Noto was not visibly connected to Google).

As for the technical bits I can't reply because that is sadly not my forté, as 
for the visuals I am sorry that you experience these problems and as someone 
who doesn't experience them and can't duplicate them there is a large issue 
here from a visual design bug standard.
But from a design perspective the work done on the Noto Font is top class 
meassured by any metric available and it also provides a good testing ground 
for the font as that font is present in a very very large chunk of places.
You claim that it is unusable on larger screens except smaller form factors 
like mobiles can easily be argued by the very same reasoning why we picked a 
well liked, well made and standard sans font like Noto in the first place. It 
exists on many many machines. 

I realize this isn't the answer but as you are well aware we give every single 
option possible from our POV to the end user via distros to change the font, 
to edit it out. The size is negligent by modern standards, the choice 
available and the choice of Noto as a standard font is a well founded one 
without any clear alternatives that cover as many different symbols and 
alphabetical variants as that. 
We haven't forced anything down anyones throat.

Now many of the more technically adept people have fairly replied, repeating 
the fact that from a technical standpoint no one is forcing you to use 
anything. But that again is their debate with you, not mine.
Since no better alternatives are presented (if you know a font that is seeing 
more active upkeep, with as good a spread or better and with more suitability 
as a standard font - this is your time to speak up), the choice of Noto was a 
necessity and one made carefully with plenty of deliberation, then I consider 
this from a VDG standpoint, a closed subject. 

On Friday, December 18, 2015 01:34:24 AM Mark Gaiser wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 18, 2015 at 1:24 AM, Eike Hein <hein at kde.org> wrote:
> > On 12/18/2015 12:31 AM, Mark Gaiser wrote:
> > > You will hear me when my workflow is severely interrupted and when i
> > > find the cause of it.
> > 
> > plasma-devel at kde.org is not mark-gaisers-workflow at kde.org.
> > 
> > Bug reports go to bugs.kde.org. User support happens on the
> > user list and in the KDE Forums.
> > 
> > > Sorry, but that is just a bogus argument for the sake of arguing.
> > > It's very obvious and expected that a sample of a specific font is meant
> > > to represent how the font looks when installed.
> > 
> > Ah c'mon. Take a look at the glyph data with FontForge and then get
> > out a ruler and check the SVG again. I don't have time to prove to
> > you the SVG isn't equivalent to Qt and CSS line height defaults.
> 
> Ohh just stop it!
> You're going into technical implementation details of a specification (SVG
> in this case).
> 
> The noto font is on the google site. It has examples of how it looks and
> you as a user can expect it to look like that.
> I see the same line height freakyness in their examples as on my computer
> and i don't like it.
> 
> That's it, end of discussion.
> 
> > Here's Google Chrome overlaid over the SVG though, re default
> > intra-glyph and intra-line spacing:
> > 
> > http://i.imgur.com/FlnxgGp.png
> > 
> > http://i.imgur.com/6d0sBup.png
> > 
> > Did you even check this stuff or is it OK if it's my time ...?
> > 
> > > And there i see too much spacing between the lines.
> > 
> > I don't, and I know this stuff pretty well.
> > 
> > > There it's somewhat fine, but that isn't the default! And that can't be
> > > influenced as user of the font.
> > 
> > It's the default.
> > 
> > Then your default differs from mine.
> 
> And i didn't change font settings at all!