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."

Comments

Please do just one thing

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Disabling Arial

[Brian Hatch]

In a recent slashdot post (I forget where) there was a reference to a Customizing Mozilla page that has a bunch of cool tricks to add to your user.prefs, etc. One of the things they noted was the problem with bad Arial fonts being installed on your machine. Here are the relevant snippets:

Various Linux distributions have problems with fonts; in particular, Arial, used in many web pages, may map to a font that looks blocky and is smaller than the requested size. A full discussion is in bug 46415, but an easy solution for Redhat users is this:

mv /usr/share/fonts/ISO8859-2 /usr/share/fonts.ISO8859-2 and then log out of X and log back in again.

You can always undo this, if necessary, with the command:

mv /usr/share/fonts.ISO8859-2 /usr/share/fonts/ISO8859-2

It's also worth reading this excellent discussion on fuzzy Linux fonts.

Or, add things like this to user.js in your .mozilla/.... directory:

// X font banning: see bug 104075.
// Ban all arial fonts, because abiword installs an ugly one
// and there doesn't seem to be a good one available:
user_pref("font.x11.rejectfontpattern", "fname=.*arial.*");

// Some alternate forms for rejectfontpattern:
//"fname=.*arial.*;scalable=.*;outline_scaled=.*;\
// xdisplay=.*;xdpy=.*;ydpy=.*;xdevice=.*");
// "fname=-zz-abiword.*;scalable=false;outline_scaled =false;");
// Alternately, reject font if accept pattern does not match it:
//user_pref("font.x11.acceptfontpattern", ".*");

Oddly Enough...

[ruineraz]

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"

Use the XFT RPM

[linuxkrn]

The 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+!

Mozilla with XFT and GTK theme support

[Reality_X]

mkdir moz1.3
cd moz1.3
lftp ftp.mozilla.org:/pub/mozilla/releases/mozilla1.3a/ Red_Hat_8x_RPMS/xft/RPMS/i386
mget *
[close mozilla]
rpm -Uvh *

You now have a beautiful browser.