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 12:42:50 AM Mark Gaiser wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 18, 2015 at 12:00 AM, Kai Uwe Broulik <kde at privat.broulik.de>
> 
> wrote:
> > ‎Hi,
> > 
> > > It is a very hard forced dependency on that font.
> > 
> > I'll send you a bigger hard drive for Christmas as you constantly complain
> > about a few megs of dependencies without any runtime overhead. I'm glad
> > that we enforce some rules on fonts in Plasma 5 as in the 4.x times it was
> > usually just embarrassing.
> 
> I consider that to be one of the biggest issues in plasma.
> 
> > > and i'm not going to make bug reports about that.
> > 
> > So don't expect anybody to fix your issues.
> 
> If i report font issues, nobody is looking at them anyway. See [1] for
> oxygen.
> Besides, this is a google font so i would have to report it against their
> bug tracker (github in this case i guess?). But what if the thing i want to
> report is not a bug at all? To mee, it just looks that way because it has
> too much line spacing. But the font just seems to be that way so the font
> itself is probably not the problem here. Just using it as desktop font is
> the problem and _that_ is where plasma comes in.
> 
> > > It is the google font (noto) with the google browser (chromium) that
> > 
> > mainly screws things up completely.
> > 
> > So what?
> 
> If THAT combination isn't tested by google, then perhaps that combination
> is not meant to used at all.
> 
> > > Either case should be sufficient reason to not use it in Plasma 5.
> > 
> > To be honest, I still use Oxygen as I couldn't be bothered to change my
> > settings. Anyway ‎line height looks okay'ish - if you really display that
> > much continuous text anywhere that this matters, except an editor or help,
> > you probably did something wrong.
> 
> Please join the discussion when you know what you're talking about.
> It was visible on every web page. Even on gmail itself.
> 
> I'm not going to send you a screenshot. Just install the font and run
> chromium. At first you will instantly notice the fonts looking weirdly
> different with more space around them. Then you start noticing layout
> breakage. Then you start wondering: "hmm, what screwed my system up this
> time".. two days later you will figure out it's a font installed by plasma.
> 
> > Cheers,
> > Kai Uwe
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > Plasma-devel mailing list
> > Plasma-devel at kde.org
> > https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/plasma-devel
> 
> [1] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=332059