Suggestion: Use Liberation fonts as default in Firefox 3

[Matej Cepl]

On 2008-01-28, 15:13 GMT, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
>> As you can see in [2] is that the fonts are looking just 
>> better.
>
> No we can't.
>
> I'm afraid that "looking better" is largely subjective when talking
> about fonts. In particular people exhibit a huge bias in favour of
> whatever font style they're used to. Take any decent modern font,
> force a user to use it exclusively for a month, and he'll
> systematically prefer it afterwards in tests. (hey, some people even
> ended up liking Luxi *shudder*)

Yes we can, kind of. Of course, that there is a lot of "nice is 
what I am used to", but there is some real logic in it. One of 
the thing which is not whimsical is that Times in its original 
form was not meant to be a basic font for general use, but pretty 
specific one -- i.e., to be used in typesetting newspapers. That 
means pretty specific requirements, one of them is ability to fit 
into pretty narrow columns which happen in newspapers. Therefore, 
Times (and Times New Roman, and Liberation Serif) are much 
narrower than what's considered general use fonts. Deja Serif 
(and Palatino, Baskerville, Bembo, and many other fonts, which 
are used in general typesetting as a basic, Czech typographers 
call it bread, font) are slightly wider, and so more easy to read 
(the optimal width of the line is known to be approx. 60 
characters per line, Times unless patologically large -- that's 
the reason, why people use so huge font sizes -- gives usually 
much much more than that).

Note, that I am saying no word about Helvetica, Arial, Deja Sans, 
or Courier, Courier New, Deja Sans Mono, even though even here 
I prefer personally Deja ones. But that's my personal preference.  
Times is inappropriate as a default font even from rational (or 
semi-rational) point of view.

Matej