gnome font change for gnome-48

[ken@…]

In late February, the Adwaita Sans font was added to fontconfig as an alias for system-ui (i.e. use for UI messages). That implies it covers more than just some Latin languages.

The Gnome-48 release notes, ​https://release.gnome.org/48/ say: New Fonts

GNOME has a new interface font in version 48, as well as a new monospace font. Named Adwaita Sans and Adwaita Mono, these new fonts look fantastic, and also have many practical advantages over the previous fonts, with better rendering, more extensive character coverage, and support for a range of modern font features.

Adwaita Sans is a customized version of the popular Inter typeface by Rasmus Andersson, and provides polished and versatile typography, optimized for high-density displays. Adwaita Mono is a custom build of the Iosevka typeface family. It is well-suited for terminal use and plain text editing, with excellent readability and incredibly extensive language coverage.

These new fonts improve visual harmony in GNOME while maintaining accessibility and aesthetic balance. We would like to take this opportunity to thank the creators of these two fantastic openly licensed typefaces, and encourage our users to support their work.

The fonts can be found at download.gnome.org/sources/adwaita-fonts at ​https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/adwaita-fonts, specifically [download.gnome.org/sources/adwaita-fonts/48/] for the current versions.

AdwaitaSans has Regular and Italic TTFs, AdwaitaMono has Regular, Bold, Italic and BoldItalic weights

The current tarball version is 48.2. If I read correctly, the TTFs are licensed under the OFL, but the whole tarball (including the source) is licensed under GPL v3.

At this point I have no idea where these Adwaita fonts are referenced in Gnome, and I do not have any idea of what they cover. I hope to take a minimal look in the next few weeks.

[Douglas R. Reno]

Hey Ken! When you take a look at this, you'll want to know that gnome-tweaks can be used to select the fonts used within GNOME. It'll be really nice to have another pair of eyes on this since my knowledge of fonts is extremely limited.

I'll update GNOME as is now, but when you have time to look at it I would really like to work with you on the font situation. When you install it, you may want to use the Extensions application to add an Applications and Places menu to the top of the screen to make it more usable.

[Bruce Dubbs]

I just downloaded the fonts tarball. They are using meson and looking for datadir.

This seems to do the right thing:

meson setup --datadir=/usr/share ..
ninja install

The output is:

[ /build/adwaita-fonts/install ]$ ls -R
.:
usr

./usr:
share

./usr/share:
fonts

./usr/share/fonts:
Adwaita

./usr/share/fonts/Adwaita:
AdwaitaMono-Bold.ttf        AdwaitaMono-Italic.ttf   AdwaitaSans-Italic.ttf
AdwaitaMono-BoldItalic.ttf  AdwaitaMono-Regular.ttf  AdwaitaSans-Regular.ttf

[Bruce Dubbs]

md5sum : 6893ec99897c18a21aec7fef6e4215a3  /usr/src/fonts/adwaita-fonts-48.2.tar.bz2
3192 /usr/src/fonts/adwaita-fonts-48.2.tar.bz2 SIZE (3.117 MB)
7668 kilobytes BUILD SIZE (7.488 MB)
SBU=.002

In xfce, the main settings found the fonts, but konsole did not. I moved the Adwaita directory to be under /usr/share/fonts/truetype and then konsole found them.

I changed the font in konsole from DejaVu Sans Mono to Adwaita Mono, but did not see any real difference on the screen.

[ken@…]

Replying to Douglas R. Reno:

Hey Ken! When you take a look at this, you'll want to know that gnome-tweaks can be used to select the fonts used within GNOME. It'll be really nice to have another pair of eyes on this since my knowledge of fonts is extremely limited.

I'll update GNOME as is now, but when you have time to look at it I would really like to work with you on the font situation. When you install it, you may want to use the Extensions application to add an Applications and Places menu to the top of the screen to make it more usable.

Hi Doug,

my fonts machine needs to be updated to a more recent LFS/BLFS (my fastest machine is currently building node.js in chroot, a looong way to go and I'm hoping I don't break my xfce desktops.

But since my blood sugar is up today, I'm reluctant to eat at the moment so I figured I could probably start to look at these on this main machine. Adwaita Sans is a variable-weight font, in the past I've not been able to work with those in XeLaTeX. I've managed to list the codepoints I can find and create a PDF in lowriter. Need to find time to install the fonts on my font machine. For the moment I'm unsure if LuaLaTeX will be able to give sensible results. I think that Sans probably contains one variant of each codepoint supported by the Inter font, in which case almost all current Latin and Cyrillic languages (even things like Ewe (African) which I no-longer cover). Certainly, it appears to support Vietnamese.

The monnospace is straightforward normal|italic, regular|bold.

But I have no intention of building any more of gnome than the minimal parts I currently build. Sorry.

I have a vague memory that I followed a link at phoronix a few weeks ago which showed *where* Adwaita Sans was going to be used as the default. Ah, link in January mentioned a merge, ​https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gsettings-desktop-schemas/-/merge_requests/89 and that mentions gsettings/desktop-schemas.

[ken@…]

Replying to Bruce Dubbs:

I just downloaded the fonts tarball. They are using meson and looking for datadir.

This seems to do the right thing:

meson setup --datadir=/usr/share ..
ninja install

AdwaitaMono-Bold.ttf AdwaitaMono-Italic.ttf AdwaitaSans-Italic.ttf AdwaitaMono-BoldItalic.ttf AdwaitaMono-Regular.ttf AdwaitaSans-Regular.ttf }}}

No need to build, the source includes the pre-built ttf files!

[ken@…]

Replying to Bruce Dubbs:

md5sum : 6893ec99897c18a21aec7fef6e4215a3  /usr/src/fonts/adwaita-fonts-48.2.tar.bz2
3192 /usr/src/fonts/adwaita-fonts-48.2.tar.bz2 SIZE (3.117 MB)
7668 kilobytes BUILD SIZE (7.488 MB)
SBU=.002

In xfce, the main settings found the fonts, but konsole did not. I moved the Adwaita directory to be under /usr/share/fonts/truetype and then konsole found them.

I changed the font in konsole from DejaVu Sans Mono to Adwaita Mono, but did not see any real difference on the screen.

The differences are subtle (only looked at Sans so far, not Mono) but the bottom right of G differs marginally, and t has a more curved base and a more central vertical.

[ken@…]

Replying to ken@…:

Adwaita Sans is a variable-weight font, in the past I've not been able to work with those in XeLaTeX. I've managed to list the codepoints I can find and create a PDF in lowriter.

<sigh/>Looking at the PDF in detail, my attempt to list the codepoints failed to show Latin 'A' although it shows in some of the titles of the blocks, such as ...Extended-A. So, I will need to redo those files.

[Xi Ruoyao]

Replying to ken@…:

Replying to ken@…:

Adwaita Sans is a variable-weight font, in the past I've not been able to work with those in XeLaTeX. I've managed to list the codepoints I can find and create a PDF in lowriter.

​https://sourceforge.net/p/xetex/feature-requests/28/

Nobody ever responded so I switched my tex workflow to lualatex. At least when I reported issues regarding VF support in lualatex the upstream fixed it very quickly.