Re: Fonts (Was: CVS commit: xsrc/external/mit)

[nia <nia%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

On Sun, May 08, 2022 at 02:28:35PM +0300, Valery Ushakov wrote:
> I would guess someone with a high-DPI display is very likely to want
> to use scaleable fonts and a more modern desktop environment, so Xt
> resources will not apply to them anyway :)
> 
> Most of my netbsd machines are remote or serial-only and so I *very*
> rarely run an X server on NetBSD. I would very much prefer that out of
> the box defaults for the base X (startx on a system without packages)
> were more or less comfortable (I know how to configure it, I don't
> want to configure it e.g. in a random throw-away test VM).  No bold
> font in xterm makes it not very comfortable - as you get older and
> your eyesight deteriorates you start to appreciate extra visual cues
> to help you see things, like bold in man pages, emacs font-lock, etc.
> 
> I think that using hight-DPI as the argument to select spleen as the
> default font sacrificing bold/italic is a catering to the wrong target
> audience that is 1) small 2) is very unlikely to stick to that default
> choice anyway.

I'm sympathetic to the accessibility argument for retaining
bold and italic, but it's already the case that the NetBSD
console just uses modified colors for displaying 'bold',
just as xterm will.

I disagree that high-DPI will remain a small audience, it's becoming
more and more The Default (including for the kinds of monitors
and TVs where people will plug in small ARM boards, the kind of
hardware where NetBSD thrives).  It makes sense to support it in
NetBSD's default configuration.  First impressions matter a lot,
and are my primary consideration.

I think it makes sense to default to e.g. misc-fixed at low-DPI
and e.g. Liberation Sans Mono (TTF font) at higher DPIs in xterm,
and I think I could accomplish this, it's just More Work.  You
aren't the first person who's raised this problem. ;)  However,
in ctwm and other xlib apps we need to use bitmap fonts.