In a recent bug report opened by Alan Bell, he inquires whether the new Ubuntu font, commissioned to be designed specifically for Ubuntu by type foundry Dalton Maag will in fact land in Maverick.

The feature freeze and User Interface freeze have long passed and the beta was released last week, so why is it not in the repository for public use already?

While Mark Shuttleworth comments “We definitely do want it in, and used by default” he later goes on to ask “I wonder if we should defer the actual use of the font till 11.04?” after being presented with a rather exhaustive to-do list by font bug triager Paul Sladen:

  1. Finalise/harmonise the open-licensing (has been done behind the scenes, so can be effected quickly)
  2. (Specifically) invite documentation team members to agressively test the PPA package
  3. Take a weather reading of what the doc team think the impact of (a) shipping (b) by default as UI font, will be
  4. Ditto for the translations teams.
  5. Ditto for the release team.
  6. Harmonise the versioning (bug #629727)
  7. Harmonise the .deb package naming (tff-something-something)
  8. Harmonise the Typeface family and display name (“Beta” or not, usurpbug #602870)
  9. Upload to main archive (on basis of (1) and (2))
  10. Main Inclusion Report (and hopefully get accepted)
  11. Feature Freeze Exception (on basis of (3), (4) and (5) and hopefully get accepted)
  12. Justify CD seeding (750kB … check there is room or start the carve up)
  13. Fix ‘High’ and ‘Critical’ bugs
  14. Adjust themes to use as User Interface default font setting (on basis of (8), (12), (13))
  15. Say thank you to everyone and offer them relaxing cups of hot tea and chocolate biscuits.

This list doesn’t cover the lack of glyphs for popular languages such as Arabic, Armenian, Georgian, so Ubuntu users using those languages (and more) might be left out to dry if it were set to default – that’s if they can get it in on time!

Is this another embarrassing oversight on Canonical’s part, similar to apparently completely forgetting about the sound theme in the last cycle?

The most logical thing to do of course is to include it as an option on the CD, but not set it as the default font. Of course it will be a huge shame that Maverick, which is already looking stunning, doesn’t contain the new font that has generated such hype and excitement this cycle.