Saturday, July 19. 2008
msttcorefonts renamed and losing relevance
The msttcorefonts package, downloader of the Microsoft Core Fonts for the Web, has been renamed to ttf-mscorefonts-installer to be more in line with other TrueType font packages (this is in testing since today).
But better news is that it hopefully is losing relevance: a few weeks ago, the ttf-liberation package entered testing. The Liberation fonts are good replacements for Arial, Courier New and Times New Roman, created by RedHat and released under a free licence. Users requiring these three fonts can just install the ttf-liberation package from main, rather than use the (necessarily) convoluted downloader from contrib. Quite a win for Debian's compatibility with the Windows World.
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Except that ttf-liberation is not a complete replacement of msttcorefonts (which contains more than just 3 fonts), so putting Provides: msttcorefonts in ttf-liberation is a bit of a lie.
Not only that. ttf-liberation provides different font with the same metrics. That means that it is not a drop-in replacement. You can't accurately reproduce documents that use Microsoft's font using the liberation fonts. Especially in print this is important. (Although using Microsoft fonts in print is a bad idea generally.)
Oh, and your Captcha sucks bad. I've now entered the wrong letters three times in a row. And I'm not visually impaired.
All well and fine except Tahoma is still sine qua non if you're thinking of using a font which does Arabic (and a few other oddball languages too, I'd imagine) in a legible fashion.
Sure, that's why I think it's an improvement for many users, not a general solution and reason to remove msttcorefonts entirely.
The fonts aren't nearly as good unantialiased compared to the MS fonts. Although they're vastly superior to DejaVu.
I don't have much knowledge about fonts, so forgive me if this question is completely lame...
Are these fonts identical in sizes to what people get by default under Windows? It's kinda frustrating for a web developer to see that sometimes one line of text on one machine turns out to be two lines on the other (given exactly the same space, pixel-wise). Heck, there's a pretty big difference between Opera and FF3 on my machine... .
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