Summary

This covers current testing efforts for the Ubuntu Font Family. As of November 2015, a new font is being tested. You can participate by providing feedback and bug reports.

Installation

Getting the font

You can test the latest version of the font by installing Ubuntu Wily. Be sure your installation is up to date before preceding. You can get an image of Ubuntu Xenial from cdimage. Virtual machine installations are OK for this testing, but testing on real hardware is preferred.

Testing

Testing on Ubuntu

You are encouraged to use your desktop as normal, and see visually how the font looks across your desktop and in different applications. In addition, you can the pango view tool to view and compare text. Specifically, try and answer the following questions:

1. Can you switch fonts ok?
2. Are the fonts readable?
3. For Arabic, Hewbrew, and related fonts, the new font contains fixes specific to issues encountered in the past with these fonts. Please use them in different scenarios and report on your findings.
4. Use the fonts under your normal workflow. Check using different sizing, weight, etc. Also check for differences when using different applications and web browsers.
5. Finally, check for the following bugs, which should be fixed:

#859677 [nc] Set Vertical Metrics to BBOX and LineGap 0 to avoid clipping on MS Windows

#710786 [1 mod] Kerning: "[g" kerning wrong for bold

#815478 [6 mod] Shape of some Cyrillic letters

#726770 [15 mod] Style: Hebrew: Nikud diacriticals not aligned to letters

If one of these bugs appears to not be fixed, please add a comment to the bug in question explaining the issue.

Using pango view

You can use the pango-view tool to manually display text if different scenarios for visual comparison.

sudo apt-get install libpango1.0-dev

Displaying using the ubuntu font

pango-view --font="Ubuntu 48" --markup \
--text='<span fallback="false"> ENTER TEST TEXT HERE</span>'

In the above, the following characters have special meanings:

U+EFFD ('') = version number U+F000 '' = hinting (88 = autohinting, font size = manual hinting)

To clear your font cache

fc-cache -fv

Testing in a browser

Enter this in the URL field:

data:text/html;charset=UTF-8,<p style="font-family:Ubuntu;font-size:70;"> test text here</p>

Reporting a bug

When reporting a bug, please include a screenshot containing the above two characters (EFFD F000) as well as the problem you want to show. In most applications you can press ctrl+shift+U before typing the code of the character followed by a space, for example ctrl+shift+u EFFD space.