Ubuntu Font Family

Mono: Greek: Gamma (capital gamma) letter disfigured

Bug #867577 reported by cosmix on 2011-10-04

This bug affects 11 people

Affects		Status	Importance	Assigned to	Milestone
	Ubuntu Font Family	Fix Committed	High	Shiraaz Gabru	Ubuntu Font Family 0.91-design

Bug Description

This bug is related (but not a duplicate --- as it pertains to Greek rather than Cyrillic) to bug #784549.

The Greek Gamma (capital gamma) character is badly designed. Gamma should not have a serif at the bottom, especially given the design principles of the Ubuntu Mono font. In serif fonts, Gamma should have a very small serif (or a microserif).

As currently designed, the greek Gamma seems alien to anyone familiar with the Greek language/script, is æsethetically incoherent with the general design of the font and is doing your otherwise admirable effort in designing a great looking 'libre' monospace font a disservice. I do realise that the designers of the font may not be familiar with Greek or the Greek script, but as it stands Gamma makes Ubuntu Mono unusable.

Please remove the bottom serif from this glyph.

Proposed solution:
  1. Remove bottom serif from monospace capital Gamma
  2. Redraw as two-stroke character, proportioned for monospace Greek usage.
  3. Get Yanna on the Canonical Design team to check over.
  4. Proposed solution on Canonical Design blog for questions

See original description

Tags:

Dmitry Shachnev (mitya57) on 2011-10-28

Changed in ubuntu-font-family:
status:	New → Confirmed

Paul Sladen (sladen) on 2011-10-28

Changed in ubuntu-font-family:
milestone:	none → 0.82

Paul Sladen (sladen) on 2011-11-02

tags:	added: uff-greek
tags:	added: uff-monospace

Paul Sladen (sladen) on 2011-11-24

summary:

- Greek Gamma (capital gamma) letter disfigured in Ubuntu Mono
+ Mono: Greek: Gamma (capital gamma) letter disfigured

Paul Sladen (sladen) on 2011-11-24

Changed in ubuntu-font-family:
milestone:	0.82 → 0.9x-design
description:	updated
tags:	added: proposed-solution reviewed
Changed in ubuntu-font-family:
assignee:	nobody → Shiraaz Gabru (shiraaz)
importance:	Undecided → High

Revision history for this message

Paul Sladen (sladen) wrote on 2011-11-28:

Ubuntu_DesignModif_2011-11-28.pdf Edit (238.8 KiB, application/pdf)

PDF showing proposed solution from Amélie Bonet (see page 4, upper half).

Is this solution acceptable? Does the Gamma look better? Does it need further widening in the monospace to fill-out the cell?

Revision history for this message

cosmix (cosm7x) wrote on 2011-11-28:

As far as the removal of the bottom serif is concerned, yes that's the optimal design for a monospace font, given Ubuntu Mono's existing æsthetics.

As far as the width question is concerned, I'd have to compare the new Gamma to other hellenic uppercase characters in the 'new' Ubuntu Mono to be able to give an informed answer, but it generally does not have to extend to the end of the cell. It does, however, need to 'fit-in' with the rest of the glyphs. In Consolas, for example, Gamma's bounding box is around 72% as wide as Theta's (a relatively 'wide' uppercase hellenic character that does seem to fill the cell). In other monospaced fonts it sometimes fills the cell. So it depends really, but this is a great improvement already, in my opinion.

Shiraaz Gabru (shiraaz) on 2011-12-12

Changed in ubuntu-font-family:
status:	Confirmed → In Progress

Shiraaz Gabru (shiraaz) on 2011-12-14

Changed in ubuntu-font-family:
status:	In Progress → Fix Committed

Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt) on 2015-03-02

tags:

added: uff-mono
removed: monospace uff-monospace

Revision history for this message

Simos Xenitellis  (simosx) wrote on 2016-01-04:

A friendly ping; this fix has not been published yet and it still affects, for example, Ubuntu 15.10 (0.83-0ubuntu1).

It would be great if Γ was fixed for 16.04.

Revision history for this message

Paul Sladen (sladen) wrote on 2016-01-04:

Hello Simon, the problem is regression: in this case the lowercase 'i' which was incorrect altered (bug #692778).

Suggestions welcome (recall that the fonts are still not automatically rebuildable from source), so what would potentially be a 2 minute fix and 30-second re-compile is likely to be several hours work.