Suggestion: Use Liberation fonts as default in Firefox 3

[Martin Sourada]

On Tue, 2008-01-29 at 06:48 -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 28, 2008 at 04:13:27PM +0100, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> > P.S. Though you've still kept Serif as default Firefox family, which
> > *is* an ass-backwards Firefox default we should change, since current
> > screens do not have enough resolution to display satisfying Serif
> > fonts.
> 
> Mine sure does.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org          <http://mattdm.org/>
> Boston University Linux      ------>              <http://linux.bu.edu/>
> 

I'd disagree with that unless you have access to HW I have not to, or
unless you use really big font sizes. For normal usage serif fonts won't
be fit for screens at usual sizes (8 - 12 pt) until good DPI will be
used (100 dpi is surely not enough, I'd think >= 150 dpi could be enough
though).

But I agree with some of the people here, that this thread is about
non-existent problem. Firefox should use system default (in my case 8 pt
DejaVu Sans/Serif/Mono with the sans one being default) fonts when
generic family and relative font size is specified in CSS stylesheet,
which is currently not. I still wonder why firefox default font is 16 pt
from serif family. System default is usually smaller (unless you have
big monitor and sit far from it, or have bad sight) and the webpages
just look strange... 

And yes, liberation is perfect substitution for Arial, but Arial is
certainly not the best font out there (like Times it's fit rather for
newspapers than for screen). DejaVu have quite good proportions, quite
good Unicode coverage (which is being increased gradually) and work good
with some other fonts which we install by default and which are
substituted when the glyph is not in DejaVu present (like Sazanami font
family for Japanese writers).

Btw. the best fonts I've seen so far are the TeX fonts (computer modern
family), but they are usually too complex for screen, but work excellent
when printed...

Anyway, what my 2 cents are: please use system wide font settings in
firefox instead of its own preferences, it really is strange as it is
now. It is not our goal to look like windows. We provide FLOSS fonts
that everyone can install on their windows/macos machine, and we give
web designers enough choice to make it possible for them to have
webpages with very similar look on various platforms. It's their
decision whether they want to use some specific font (which can be e.g.
for Arial substituted by Liberation Sans in out environment) or whether
they want their pages to use system wide font settings (and thus better
integrate into desktop).

Martin
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