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DejaVu is now the default font of Fedora.


What is this DejaVu thing?

Fedora is calling for a round of testing/feedback on the DejaVu font family . You don't need any technical background to provide it. Just read this page.

http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/wiki/skins/common/images/dejavu_logo2.png

DejaVu is the most popular FLOSS derivative of the Bitstream Vera font family . DejaVu is currently consolidating the Vera forks initiated after it become clear Vera would not be updated or fixed any time soon (the last Vera release was done April 16, 2003).

The main DejaVu aims are: 1. Quality (fix all the problems of existing Vera glyphs) 2. Coverage (extend Vera beyond its current Latin-9 limits : Cyrillic, Greek, Armenian, Arabic , etc)

DejaVu is already extensively used by Debian , Ubuntu (default font) and Suse (replaced Suse own fonts) to name a few other major Linux distributions.

DejaVu screenshots are available on here and there

Why should I care?

DejaVu is being proposed as the Fedora Core 6 default font. (see also the fedora-devel discussion )

DejaVu touches a lot of languages. Just look at the [#head-b21e265839926d95ecee4572b0da56a4c53cb03c coverage] of the current version.

However do not panic if you don't like the look of the font for your langage. Based on the feedback you provide now the fonts will either be fixed or part of them blacklisted. The dejavu-fonts-block Fedora Extras package showcases this kind of blacklisting for Arabic and Persian

What can I do?

Some people feel the font big coverage was attained by sacrificing quality. This was never the project intent. To help put this issue to rest we ask everyone interested in crisp fonts on FOSS Desktops to:

Install DejaVu

If you have the Fedora Extra repositories configured, the following commands will work :

  • with Fedora Core 6 Testx or Fedora Devel

  • with Fedora Core 5

  • with Fedora Core 4

The fonts are also available unpackaged as a direct download .

Test it

Try the DejaVu fonts in your usual apps and report any problem you find on the DejaVu bugzilla

Problems may include:

  • bad rendering in some sizes, apps or when printed
  • ugly, difficult to read or missing glyphs
  • bad glyph or accent spacing

If you just wish to report the font is great the designers would appreciate a mail to the DejaVu mailing list

A good problem report will include the following information:

  • the tested font family (DejaVu Sans, Serif or Sans Mono)
  • your font settings (as displayed in gnome-font-properties)
  • your screen model, type, size and resolution
  • the resolution reported by xdpyinfo
  • a screenshot exhibiting the problem, and (if possible) the font settings the application used

To help evaluate your reports please indicate your cultural background. Remarks from native speakers or professional typesetters obviously weight more than dilettantes commenting on foreign language rendering.

Reports from native speakers of non western langages would be especially appreciated (Arabic, Armenian...)

Lastly if you don't want to bother with subscribing to the dejavu mailing list or create a bugzilla account just send the reports by mail to the Fedora Extras DejaVu maintainer and he'll dispatch them wherever needed.

Frequently asked questions

Are the fonts hinted?

The DejaVu fonts are partially hinted . Hinting is a work in progress, old glyphs will tend to be hinted, recently changed glyphs may only be hinted after a few releases. However, Fedora ships fontconfig with the bytecode interpreter off, and autohinting on, so unless you replace the Fedora fontconfig with some other binaries you won't notice the difference.

I don't like antialiased fonts!

DejaVu fonts does not force you to use any particular antialiasing level. If you chose to disable antialiasing on your system, installing the fonts won't change your setting.

How can I go back?

If you installed the fonts using yum, the following command will remove them from the system:

  • for Fedora Devel, Fedora Core 6 Testx, Fedora Core 5

  • for Fedora Core 4

If you used the direct download option, just delete the font files.

Note that even after dejavu-fonts-makedefault is uninstalled, fontconfig will still use DejaVu fonts by default if it finds them on the system. This choice was made to avoid touching fontconfig files more often than strictly necessary. The next fontconfig update will replace the changes by the Fedora default setup.

To reverse this change manually remove the DejaVu -related lines from the following blocks in /etc/fonts/fonts.conf:

<alias>
<family>serif</family>
<prefer>
[list of serif fonts by priority] 
</prefer>
<alias>
<alias>
<family>sans-serif</family>
<prefer>
[list of sans-serif fonts by priority] 
</prefer>
<alias>
<alias>
<family>monospace</family>
<prefer>
[list of monospace fonts by priority] 
</prefer>
<alias>

If you want to keep the fonts on your system but do not wish them as default uninstall the dejavu-fonts-makedefault package


and edit /etc/fonts/fonts.conf as just described

DejaVu is too wide/thin/heavy!

The DejaVu project tries to follow the style defined by Vera's original Bitstream designer, Jim Lyles. There is no plan to turn DejaVu into the clone of some other widely used font.

DejaVu will feel different at first. Give it some time - after a while you may revisit your opinion of your current fonts.

Technical challenges of complex fonts like DejaVu

DejaVu big coverage and use of advanced wikipedia:OpenType features is stressing the Fedora font infrastructure. The current problems were best described by Ben Laenen in this message . They are now well-known and being addressed by the various FOSS projects impacted. We ask you not to bring these issues up again during this testing phase.

None of the issues are DejaVu specific, they all need fixing regardless of DejaVu Fedora Core inclusion, and while DejaVu could use the fixes it's not faring worse than any other complex font (like popular Microsoft fonts) without them now.

This is solely a user-lever æstethics feedback test aimed at:

  • identifying problems the DejaVu team can fix in the next versions of the font,
  • identifying big problems that will require fontconfig-level blacklisting (and while advanced fontconfig aliasing logic would help the dejavu-fonts-block package shows some blacklisting can already be done with the current Fedora Devel fontconfig version)

I can't evaluate my langage based on the linked screenshots!

First, many system settings can influence font rendering, and we'd really like you to test the fonts on your actual system.

That being said, Davide Viti (zinosat at tiscali dot it) will probably appreciate if you can send him better text samples for his next screenshots batch .

What is the list of currently reported problems?

The current list of problem reports is available online.


DejaVu current coverage

Here is the language coverage of the 2.7 version which is currently in Fedora Extras. Note that DejaVu has a short monthly release cycle. The next release will include Hebrew among other enhancements .

<-2> Locale <-2> DejaVu Sans <-2> DejaVu Serif <-2> DejaVu Sans Mono
aa Afar 100,00% (62/62) 100,00% (62/62) 100,00% (62/62)
ab Abkhazia 100,00% (90/90) 93,00% (84/90) 84,00% (76/90)
af Afrikaans 100,00% (69/69) 100,00% (69/69) 100,00% (69/69)
ar Arabic 100,00% (125/125) (0/125) (0/125)
ast Asturian 100,00% (72/72) 100,00% (72/72) 100,00% (72/72)
ava Avaric 100,00% (67/67) 100,00% (67/67) 100,00% (67/67)
ay Aymara 100,00% (60/60) 100,00% (60/60) 100,00% (60/60)
az Azerbaijani 100,00% (148/148) 97,00% (144/148) 97,00% (144/148)
az-ir Azerbaijani (in Iran) 100,00% (130/130) (0/130) (0/130)
ba Bashkir 100,00% (82/82) 100,00% (82/82) 97,00% (80/82)
bam Bambara 100,00% (60/60) 100,00% (60/60) 100,00% (60/60)
be Byelorussian 100,00% (68/68) 100,00% (68/68) 100,00% (68/68)
bg Bulgarian 100,00% (60/60) 100,00% (60/60) 100,00% (60/60)
bi Bislama 100,00% (58/58) 100,00% (58/58) 100,00% (58/58)
bin Edo or Bini 100,00% (78/78) 100,00% (78/78) 100,00% (78/78)
br Breton 100,00% (64/64) 100,00% (64/64) 100,00% (64/64)
bs Bosnian 100,00% (62/62) 100,00% (62/62) 100,00% (62/62)
bua Buriat (Buryat) 100,00% (70/70) 100,00% (70/70) 100,00% (70/70)
ca Catalan 100,00% (74/74) 100,00% (74/74) 100,00% (74/74)
ce Chechen 100,00% (67/67) 100,00% (67/67) 100,00% (67/67)
ch Chamorro 100,00% (58/58) 100,00% (58/58) 100,00% (58/58)
chm Mari (Lower Cheremis / Upper Cheremis) 100,00% (76/76) 100,00% (76/76) 97,00% (74/76)
co Corsican 100,00% (84/84) 100,00% (84/84) 100,00% (84/84)
cs Czech 100,00% (82/82) 100,00% (82/82) 100,00% (82/82)
cu Old Church Slavonic 100,00% (103/103) 78,00% (81/103) 74,00% (77/103)
cv Chuvash 100,00% (74/74) 100,00% (74/74) 100,00% (74/74)
cy Welsh 100,00% (78/78) 100,00% (78/78) 100,00% (78/78)
da Danish 100,00% (70/70) 100,00% (70/70) 100,00% (70/70)
de German 100,00% (59/59) 100,00% (59/59) 100,00% (59/59)
el Greek 100,00% (69/69) 100,00% (69/69) 100,00% (69/69)
en English 100,00% (72/72) 100,00% (72/72) 100,00% (72/72)
eo Esperanto 100,00% (64/64) 100,00% (64/64) 100,00% (64/64)
es Spanish 100,00% (66/66) 100,00% (66/66) 100,00% (66/66)
et Estonian 100,00% (64/64) 100,00% (64/64) 100,00% (64/64)
eu Basque 100,00% (56/56) 100,00% (56/56) 100,00% (56/56)
fa Persian 100,00% (129/129) (0/129) (0/129)
fi Finnish 100,00% (62/62) 100,00% (62/62) 100,00% (62/62)
fj Fijian 100,00% (52/52) 100,00% (52/52) 100,00% (52/52)
fo Faroese 100,00% (68/68) 100,00% (68/68) 100,00% (68/68)
fr French 100,00% (84/84) 100,00% (84/84) 100,00% (84/84)
ful Fulah (Fula) 100,00% (62/62) 100,00% (62/62) 100,00% (62/62)
fur Friulian 100,00% (66/66) 100,00% (66/66) 100,00% (66/66)
fy Frisian 100,00% (75/75) 100,00% (75/75) 100,00% (75/75)
ga Irish 100,00% (80/80) 100,00% (80/80) 86,00% (69/80)
gd Scots Gaelic 100,00% (70/70) 100,00% (70/70) 100,00% (70/70)
gl Galician 100,00% (66/66) 100,00% (66/66) 100,00% (66/66)
gn Guarani 100,00% (70/70) 100,00% (70/70) 100,00% (70/70)
gv Manx Gaelic 100,00% (54/54) 100,00% (54/54) 100,00% (54/54)
ha Hausa 100,00% (60/60) 100,00% (60/60) 100,00% (60/60)
haw Hawaiian 100,00% (63/63) 100,00% (63/63) 100,00% (63/63)
ho Hiri Motu 100,00% (52/52) 100,00% (52/52) 100,00% (52/52)
hr Croatian 100,00% (62/62) 100,00% (62/62) 100,00% (62/62)
hu Hungarian 100,00% (70/70) 100,00% (70/70) 100,00% (70/70)
hy Armenian 100,00% (77/77) (0/77) (0/77)
ia Interlingua 100,00% (52/52) 100,00% (52/52) 100,00% (52/52)
ibo Igbo 100,00% (58/58) 100,00% (58/58) 100,00% (58/58)
id Indonesian 100,00% (54/54) 100,00% (54/54) 100,00% (54/54)
ie Interlingue 100,00% (52/52) 100,00% (52/52) 100,00% (52/52)
ik Inupiaq (Inupiak, Eskimo) 100,00% (68/68) 100,00% (68/68) 100,00% (68/68)
io Ido 100,00% (52/52) 100,00% (52/52) 100,00% (52/52)
is Icelandic 100,00% (70/70) 100,00% (70/70) 100,00% (70/70)
it Italian 100,00% (72/72) 100,00% (72/72) 100,00% (72/72)
kaa Kara-Kalpak (Karakalpak) 100,00% (78/78) 100,00% (78/78) 100,00% (78/78)
ki Kikuyu 100,00% (56/56) 100,00% (56/56) 100,00% (56/56)
kk Kazakh 100,00% (77/77) 100,00% (77/77) 100,00% (77/77)
kl Greenlandic 100,00% (81/81) 100,00% (81/81) 100,00% (81/81)
ku Kurdish 100,00% (64/64) 100,00% (64/64) 100,00% (64/64)
ku-ir Kurdish in Iran 100,00% (32/32) (0/32) (0/32)
kum Kumyk 100,00% (66/66) 100,00% (66/66) 100,00% (66/66)
kv Komi (Komi-Permyak/Komi-Siryan) 100,00% (70/70) 100,00% (70/70) 100,00% (70/70)
kw Cornish 100,00% (64/64) 100,00% (64/64) 100,00% (64/64)
ky Kirgiz 100,00% (70/70) 100,00% (70/70) 100,00% (70/70)
la Latin 100,00% (68/68) 100,00% (68/68) 100,00% (68/68)
lb Luxembourgish (Letzeburgesch) 100,00% (75/75) 100,00% (75/75) 100,00% (75/75)
lez Lezghian (Lezgian) 100,00% (67/67) 100,00% (67/67) 100,00% (67/67)
lt Lithuanian 100,00% (70/70) 100,00% (70/70) 100,00% (70/70)
lv Latvian 100,00% (78/78) 100,00% (78/78) 100,00% (78/78)
mg Malagasy 100,00% (56/56) 100,00% (56/56) 100,00% (56/56)
mh Marshallese 100,00% (62/62) 100,00% (62/62) 100,00% (62/62)
mi Maori 100,00% (64/64) 100,00% (64/64) 100,00% (64/64)
mk Macedonian 100,00% (42/42) 100,00% (42/42) 100,00% (42/42)
mo Moldavian 100,00% (128/128) 100,00% (128/128) 100,00% (128/128)
mt Maltese 100,00% (72/72) 100,00% (72/72) 100,00% (72/72)
nb Norwegian Bokmal 100,00% (70/70) 100,00% (70/70) 100,00% (70/70)
nds Low Saxon 100,00% (59/59) 100,00% (59/59) 100,00% (59/59)
nl Dutch 100,00% (82/82) 100,00% (82/82) 100,00% (82/82)
nn Norwegian Nynorsk 100,00% (76/76) 100,00% (76/76) 100,00% (76/76)
no Norwegian (Bokmal) 100,00% (70/70) 100,00% (70/70) 100,00% (70/70)
ny Chichewa 100,00% (54/54) 100,00% (54/54) 100,00% (54/54)
oc Occitan 100,00% (70/70) 100,00% (70/70) 100,00% (70/70)
om Oromo or Galla 100,00% (52/52) 100,00% (52/52) 100,00% (52/52)
os Ossetic 100,00% (66/66) 100,00% (66/66) 100,00% (66/66)
pl Polish 100,00% (70/70) 100,00% (70/70) 100,00% (70/70)
pt Portuguese 100,00% (82/82) 100,00% (82/82) 100,00% (82/82)
rm Rhaeto-Romance (Romansch) 100,00% (66/66) 100,00% (66/66) 100,00% (66/66)
ro Romanian 100,00% (62/62) 100,00% (62/62) 100,00% (62/62)
ru Russian 100,00% (66/66) 100,00% (66/66) 100,00% (66/66)
sah Yakut 100,00% (76/76) 100,00% (76/76) 97,00% (74/76)
sco Scots 100,00% (56/56) 96,00% (54/56) 96,00% (54/56)
se North Sami 100,00% (66/66) 100,00% (66/66) 100,00% (66/66)
sel Selkup (Ostyak-Samoyed) 100,00% (66/66) 100,00% (66/66) 100,00% (66/66)
sh Serbo-Croatian 100,00% (76/76) 100,00% (76/76) 100,00% (76/76)
sk Slovak 100,00% (86/86) 100,00% (86/86) 100,00% (86/86)
sl Slovenian 100,00% (62/62) 100,00% (62/62) 100,00% (62/62)
sm Samoan 100,00% (53/53) 100,00% (53/53) 100,00% (53/53)
sma South Sami 100,00% (60/60) 100,00% (60/60) 100,00% (60/60)
smj Lule Sami 100,00% (60/60) 100,00% (60/60) 100,00% (60/60)
smn Inari Sami 100,00% (68/68) 100,00% (68/68) 100,00% (68/68)
sms Skolt Sami 100,00% (80/80) 100,00% (80/80) 90,00% (72/80)
so Somali 100,00% (52/52) 100,00% (52/52) 100,00% (52/52)
sq Albanian 100,00% (56/56) 100,00% (56/56) 100,00% (56/56)
sr Serbian 100,00% (76/76) 100,00% (76/76) 100,00% (76/76)
sv Swedish 100,00% (68/68) 100,00% (68/68) 100,00% (68/68)
sw Swahili 100,00% (52/52) 100,00% (52/52) 100,00% (52/52)
tg Tajik 100,00% (78/78) 100,00% (78/78) 97,00% (76/78)
tk Turkmen 100,00% (74/74) 97,00% (72/74) 97,00% (72/74)
tn Tswana 100,00% (56/56) 100,00% (56/56) 100,00% (56/56)
to Tonga 100,00% (53/53) 100,00% (53/53) 100,00% (53/53)
tr Turkish 100,00% (70/70) 100,00% (70/70) 100,00% (70/70)
ts Tsonga 100,00% (52/52) 100,00% (52/52) 100,00% (52/52)
tt Tatar 100,00% (76/76) 97,00% (74/76) 97,00% (74/76)
tw Twi 100,00% (73/73) 100,00% (73/73) 100,00% (73/73)
tyv Tuvinian 100,00% (70/70) 100,00% (70/70) 100,00% (70/70)
ug Uighur 100,00% (125/125) (0/125) (0/125)
uk Ukrainian 100,00% (72/72) 100,00% (72/72) 100,00% (72/72)
uz Uzbek 100,00% (68/68) 100,00% (68/68) 100,00% (68/68)
ven Venda 100,00% (62/62) 100,00% (62/62) 100,00% (62/62)
vi Vietnamese 100,00% (194/194) 77,00% (150/194) 60,00% (118/194)
vo Volapuk 100,00% (54/54) 100,00% (54/54) 100,00% (54/54)
vot Votic 100,00% (62/62) 100,00% (62/62) 100,00% (62/62)
wa Walloon 100,00% (70/70) 100,00% (70/70) 100,00% (70/70)
wen Sorbian languages (lower and upper) 100,00% (76/76) 100,00% (76/76) 100,00% (76/76)
wo Wolof 100,00% (66/66) 100,00% (66/66) 100,00% (66/66)
xh Xhosa 100,00% (52/52) 100,00% (52/52) 100,00% (52/52)
yap Yapese 100,00% (58/58) 100,00% (58/58) 100,00% (58/58)
yo Yoruba 100,00% (119/119) 100,00% (119/119) 100,00% (119/119)
zu Zulu 100,00% (52/52) 100,00% (52/52) 100,00% (52/52)
ur Urdu 94,00% (137/145) (0/145) (0/145)
ps-af Pashto in Afghanistan 83,00% (41/49) (0/49) (0/49)
ps-pk Pashto in Pakistan 81,00% (40/49) (0/49) (0/49)
zh-cn Chinese (simplified) 0,00% (2/6765) 0,00% (2/6765) 0,00% (1/6765)
zh-sg Chinese in Singapore 0,00% (2/6765) 0,00% (2/6765) 0,00% (1/6765)