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Best Fonts for Linux Browsers?
BladeMelbourne asks: "As a web developer with a healthy love of Linux, I was wondering which fonts look great in Linux web browsers (particularly Mozilla/Netscape). Using 'Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif' just doesn't look nice.
Do different distro's have different fonts? Which fonts resemble Arial/Helvetica? Which fonts are anti-aliased?
Speaking of anti-aliased, does anyone know concisely how to get AA fonts with Mozilla on RedHat 8.0? I have my TTFs working, but don't seem to display correcly and look rather ugly on my display."
... and courier. After 2 yrs of experiments I found them to make the best combination.
You say you are a web developer, so please pick those fonts out for yourself and just for yourself. Don't pick fonts for me, I like the ones I already have thanks.
I always use Konqueror with Bitstream Charter, Bitstream Courier, Adobe Times and Adobe Helvetica.
/etc/fonts/fonts.conf to turn off hinting on the Bitstream fonts.
In addition, I've found that my eyes are accustomed to having fonts with smaller spaces and no hinting, so with Xft1 I compiled with the xft-quality patch from Keith Packard, and for Xft2 I compile with the spacing part applied and then manually set
Microsoft Verdana & Tahoma fonts. They common fonts for MS systems, and work under linux if you install the fonts. It's really hard to tell the difference between sites using IE on Windows and Mozilla on Linux with these fonts installed.
I typically use "Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" or "Tahoma, Arial, Helvetica"
They are, but it's a difficult problem and it's taking a lot of time. The situation is significantly better than it was 2 years ago, and hardly recognisable to the mess we had 5 years ago.
- Proportional: Serif
- Serif: Georgia
- Sans-serif: Arial
- Cursive: Lucida
- Fantasy: PostAntiqua
- Monospace: Courier New
You installed the Microsoft Fonts Add-OnThe easist way to get Mozilla to use rpms that had support for XFT (AA Fonts). for 1.2.1 http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/releases/mozill a1.2.1/Red_Hat_8x_RPMS/xft/
Of course, you could always download the source and compile it with --enable-xft. :)
As for my own pref, I like Luxi Sans. AA support looks great on mine, and even the menus use the default font. Nice when you are running 1600x1200+!
For antialiasing, you're going to have to compile your own mozilla -- Red Hat's packages aren't built with --enable-xft.
For fonts, I say Verdana and Epsy Sans are the two best proportional on-screen text fonts. Unfortunately, neither can be freely distributed.
May we never see th
Utopia
Do not use Arial or Times New Roman, Courier New or Georgia, use just Courier, Helvetica, and Times. Arial etc. are Microsoft fonts that should just go to hell. Even though Apple recommends Arial, Times New Roman, Georgia for the Web, they are nonstandard fonts when it comes to publishing.
mkdir moz1.3/ Red_Hat_8x_RPMS/xft/RPMS/i386
cd moz1.3
lftp ftp.mozilla.org:/pub/mozilla/releases/mozilla1.3a
mget *
[close mozilla]
rpm -Uvh *
You now have a beautiful browser.
This has been on ./ very recently. In addition to downloading the ttf mozilla rpm for RH8.0, you also need to "build" and install the MS core font set for the web from corefonts.sourceforge.net.
I did the following to enable antialiased fonts in Mozilla - I didn't compile my own Mozilla, but I do tend to use recent nightlies:
I had the libfreetype6 Debian package installed.
I made made my own font directory and copied the *.ttf files that I needed to it, because one of my more esoteric fonts would cause Mozilla to crash.
In the end I gave up on anti-aliased fonts because they gave me a headache unless I made them much bigger than I'm used to with my normal "crisp" X11 fonts.
#exclude <ms/windows.h>
But then again, when you do your website, it is usually enough to define the font family that you want to be used, rather than the exact font.
Althought my magick line in css is usually
Do not use Arial. Arial is a pig ugly font. It does not look like Helvetica. It is a second rate knock-off.
Read this and this, and don't use Arial again.
While those pages are loading, how can you say you are a webdesigner, when you haven't learnt that web pages are not wysiwyg? I bet your pages look shit.
In any case. Don't specify Arial, or at the very least, specifiy it last. Put "san serif" in the list in front. Arial is an abomination, and should be killed. If you want Helvetica, say so, but don't ever imagine that Arial can take the place of Helvetica.
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
They have to setup nice TTFs and AA fonts. This responsibility has been dumped onto the users by the distros who couldnt care what text looks like.
So web developers shouldnt bend and break to be Linux compatible, Linux has been far more standards based than other OSes, and should too in font display. Web developers already are trying to be flexible to allow IE weirdocities, lets not let Linux do the same to them.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
I've been using face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica" size=-1 for a few years, and that seems to work right in the default install of all the computers I use. (My school's sun lab included.) Arial looks really bad in Mozilla on linux.
Also, do yourself a favor and use CSS. I use this, which also displays text at the right size on Macs (which like to make fonts smaller when browsing the web):
P { font: 11px Verdana,Arial,Helvetica }
I can't say much for what the "right way" to do this is without offending those folks who believe the web should not have any markup for design.
may be trolling in this, but I've always wondered why this is an issue at all? Why hasn't someone taken the time to make the UI more User-Friendly?
It has been done. The font tool in the KDE Control Center works great for enabling AA and installing new fonts.
Oh, and whatever happened to unifying all these various hacks into one standardized way of doing things. How many ways are there to enable anti-aliased fonts? How many ways are there to make the text readable?
I have no idea how many ways there may be, but unifying them all into one tool is anathema to the OSS developement process. Every single OSS tool has competition, and I think that is vital to the continued health of the community.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
...as standard.
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF/luxi*
They're called Lucidux or Luxi, and they're installed into
Use them. They'll become the standard fonts for Linux web browsers once the rest of the distros get XFree 4.2
Folks love to comment how ugly they think GUIs look under X in Netscape/Mozilla, and the same folks often suggest the solution is to use anti-aliased fonts. Sure, anti-aliased fonts are good.
However, I'd like to share my experience with a very simple alternative method of getting really great looking fonts in X without installing or changing any software.
- Change your X11 display resolution so pixels are about the same size as the dot pitch of your monitor. For a dot pitch of 0.25mm, the ideal resolution may be 1600x1200.
The jagged edges of the unaliased X fonts totally disappear. Quasi font anti-aliasing is as good as true anti-aliased fonts but without the hassle! If I had my macro lens handy I'd take a photo of my monitor screen running 1600x1200 and show you the incredibly smooth font outlines I've got with this very ordinary variable width Times Roman 18pt font in Netscape. Using this method I've got perfect results on every CRT display I've tested including cheap Iiyama CRT displays like 19" (USD$150), 17" (USD$120) and 15" (USD$90) monitors. If I reduce X to a resolution much less than 1600x1200 like 1024x768, of course, the jagged edges return.Why oil price increase equals economic trouble (Score: Interesti