Fonts with linux & hebrew
It’s very known that every new Linux user has problem with fonts. As explained in Avi Alkalay’s how-to Why Fonts on Linux Aren’t Straight Forward ? the main problem comes from web-designers cause they make web-pages for windows font. Whole how-to is very well written for newbies, i suggest to everybody who have similar problem to read it.
His solution is to install MS fonts and i start from there, why i didn’t like MS fonts!
1) Using MS fonts
In Debian world you can install MS fonts with command ″apt get install msttcorefonts″. My experience using MS fonts is very bad. And this is why, after installing my fonts got even worse then they were…
* With Hebrew:
* With Latin:
I don’t know about you but FireFox Sans-serif shows much much better then Arial. Really, all credits go to Sans-serif and Arial simply is not for my platform. It’s just my taste, lot of people like this! So i found myself where i started.
2) Using default linux fonts
I’m using Ubuntu 8.04 and this problem became much annoying after upgrade from 7.10. I used Ben Dodson FireFox plug-in Font Finder 0.5b for detecting CSS font (very useful plug-in). I decided to test whatsup.co.il page for this purpose. This is screenshot.
On first picture is sans-serif font, this is the way i want it. On second picture is CSS which says:
font-family: arial,sans-serif,helvetica
font-size: 14px
So, IMO English is better on sans-serif, English with CSS looks little and annoying. But look at something weird, CSS says to use Arial font, if you don’t have it then use sans-serif and if you don’t have that then use helvetice. But wait, on first picture i hacked it to use only sans-serif and by rules of CSS it should render sans-serif cause i don’t have Arial. So what’s the trick? I really don’t know, it could be a bug in firefox3 beta5.
I found some pages where CSS says:
font-family: verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif
And there English letters are so terrible that’s very hard to read. So it returns me to main question, if i don’t have verdana, arial, helvetica fonts why i don’t use sans-serif then? I decited to leave it as it is and i found another solution.
Well, not so perfect solution but it will solve the problem. Go with your firefox: Edit–>Preferences–>Content–>Advanced..–>
then uncheck “Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of my selection above”
This is not so perfect cause it will show only one font for whole Internet but crazy thing that all the rest fonts are ugly with my platform. Still looking for perfect solution and if i found any I promise I’ll post
In terms of glyph quality, your fonts are rendering pretty well.
Maybe for your taste Arial at this small size looks bad, but this is how this font should look. BTW, Arial was not designed to be used at this small sizes. Verdana and Tahoma are better in this case.
Linux Sans Serif is Bitstream Vera (or Dejavu, or similar), a font very similar to Verdana.
Just one note: I prefer Microsoft fonts because they are very well hinted so they look good at small sizes. This is not the case of Vera (Linux Sans Serif). If they hint Vera, from an beauty viewpoint it is a very nice font too.
Avi Alkalay - April 27th, 2008 at 2:14 pmHi Avi,
confiq - April 27th, 2008 at 11:19 pmThanks for reply!
I just checked Arial in windows in case I’m missing something but it’s almost same as it is on Linux!
It’s really hard for me to get used for Arial i still didn’t play with other fonts.
However perhaps i’ll replace Arial with some other font with FontConfig and i’ll post results!