Font tip

[Razzl]

If you don't like the "stretched" look of the fonts and window titles on a widescreen (kind of like my stupid Toshiba lcd tv that won't go "fullscreen" on demand, so everyone in a widescreen movie looks distorted) I have some font setting suggestions. It occurred to me that condensed fonts would cure the stretch, so with some experiment I found that Dejavu and Dejavu sans condensed for the primary fonts and Dejavu mono for the fixed-width (terminal) font looks good, and the mysteriously named "Al-Mothnna" makes a nice font for the window titles. Dejavu mono is especially good for the fixed-width font because the small "L" and numeral "1" are very distinct and can't be confused for each other.

I find the whole font package intriguing--why all the arabic names for western fonts? The fonts all look like standard Roman fonts that weren't invented in the middle east--could it be that they were deposited in open source repositories by programmers in countries where the rights of the font developers aren't recognized? That would be a big problem for Ubuntu and Canonical up the road, so I hope they've looked into this. (And might offer up an explanation for us mystified). It does no good to shun proprietary drivers and then up the road be forced to pay for proprietary fonts that were used without permission...

And while we're all tweaking our installations, did anybody find that the Windows folder migrator didn't work well? Ubuntu only migrated a couple of my folders from "my documents" and ignored all the obvious stuff (non-private, unencrypted folders on the same level of the hierarchy) such as "my pictures" and "my spreadsheets". It brought over some Windows system-created folders containing useless download files...

[Dragonbite]

Thanks for the mention of the fonts. Even though I don't have widescreen, I changed my font to Devavu to shake things up some.

Did the migration do anything for moving Thunderbird emails and settings?

[Razzl]

I don't use Thunderbird in Windows, and it isn't included by default in Ubuntu (they give you Evolution instead), so I would expect you would have to do that manually. I can't remember whether I moved my Firefox bookmarks manually from WinXP to Ubuntu (I don't use Firefox as my main browser in WinXP, so the bookmarks on my Windows copy of Firefox were migrated from IE7).

The migrator migrated only my desktop wallpaper currently in use, not any of the other theme elements (like cursors, hourglasses, or sound effects) or other wallpapers. It's easy enough to access the document folders in Windows using Nautilus, but it would have been nice if the migrator had brought over all my documents. The folders it did bring over seemed to be only some system-created folders with useless old download files and one picture file with digital camera images (but not other folders with Microsoft Office documents and web pages). Strange, not very helpful. I'll fill out a bug report when I get around to it...

[Razzl]

It turns out that Dejavu has been used as a default font in earlier versions of Kubuntu. (And clever folks may have discovered you can use your Windows fonts such as Calibri in Ubuntu, but somehow they lack the tight look they have in Windows).