Bug 14295

Summary:	Hebrew Sans bold is unnaturally wide
Product:	DejaVu	Reporter:	Yotam Benshalom <benshalom>
Component:	Sans	Assignee:	Deja Vu bugs <dejavu-bugs>
Status:	ASSIGNED ---	QA Contact:
Severity:	normal
Priority:	medium
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	Other
OS:	All
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:
Attachments:	Narrower Hebrew characters in Bold

Description Yotam Benshalom 2008-01-29 10:48:04 UTC

Bold Sans fonts are extremely wide in Hebrew. a bold Hebrew Sans string is approximately 20% longer (!) then an identical non-bold string. This not only interrupts with proper reading, but also distorts any websites using bold fonts (example: www.haaretz.co.il, note the blue links-bar below the title and the titles of the individual stories). I have mentioned this earlier several times in letters to the mailing list, but to no avail.
This problem does not exist in any other common font used for general display of Hebrew (Nachliely, Guttman, the MS family...). It does not exist in Latin letters used in DEjaVu sans, where the difference in length between a bold and a regular string is only about 5%, which is much more bearable.

Comment 1 Denis Jacquerye 2008-03-25 09:03:05 UTC

Created attachment 15454 [details]
Narrower Hebrew characters in Bold

This is a test wit some narrower Hebrew characters in Bold. Not all characters have bee modified, for example ש <U+05E9> since it needs to be wide enough for compositions like שּ <U+FB49>.

Comment 2 Yotam Benshalom 2008-03-25 09:32:17 UTC

Very nice work! It looks much better already. The work on ב, כ, ך and ק is especially noticeable and impressive. The spacing also seems to have improved greatly.
If you want to try and squeeze it a bit more, I think that ך and maybe ד can take some more narrowing. The letter ש, as you noted, is still problematic. I think it should not pose a difficulty, because bold font is very seldom used with diacritics. Hebrew diacritics are used in dictionaries, poetry, religious texts and children's literature, but not in titles. Also, in some fonts the diacritics in the ש are only partially seen (the dot touches the middle "pillar"), and this is perfectly fine.
Thank you for the good work!

Use of freedesktop.org services, including Bugzilla, is subject to our Code of Conduct. How we collect and use information is described in our Privacy Policy.