What is the advantage of Arev over DejaVu? It seems like DejaVu has already incorporated the Arev characters, and includes a large number of other characters as well. Further, from the copyright, it looks like the Arev project has been abandoned (it hasn't seen a release in 9 years), while the DejaVu project is well-maintained (last release in May of this year) and is widely-used in open-source projects.

At the time I made the choice of Arev (some years ago), it contained many
more math glyphs. But you are correct that DejaVu has incorporated those
glyphs and is more active. I would say that DejaVu seems like a better
choice now.

My primary motivation for the pull request was to create a default san
serif font with matching math font. San-serif seems to be a better design
choice for figures (e.g., see Tufte
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi). Arev/DejaVu seem to be a
pretty font with good, matching math glyphs for rendering equations, and a
permissive license, which makes it a good way to achieve the design goal of
sans-serif font with math capabilities.

On Wed, Sep 23, 2015 at 4:16 AM, toddrjen notifications@github.com wrote:

What is the advantage of Arev over DejaVu
http://dejavu-fonts.org/wiki/Main_Page? It seems like DejaVu has
already incorporated the Arev characters, and includes a large number of
other characters as well. Further, from the copyright, it looks like the
Arev project has been abandoned (it hasn't seen a release in almost 10
years), while the DejaVu project is well-maintained (last release in May of
this year) and is widely-used in open-source project.

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Prof. Rob Hetland
Texas A&M Univ. – Dept. of Oceanography
http://pong.tamu.edu/~rob

So, I think we're in agreement to not use Arev, but the Vera that we ship could probably use an update. Sorry -- brainslip -- I think we should move to DejaVu @hetland: Would you like to make a PR to do that?

As I mentioned in #5128, a new default font should have associated mathtext fontset. I have gone ahead and added them for DejaVu in #5214 in preparation for the default change. This has the advantage over setting custom in mathtext.fontset that I was able to set STIX as fallback, which matches DejaVu better than Computer Modern does.

Moving setting DejaVu as default for both text and math to #5214