Default fonts in Firefox

[Danilo Šegan]

Today at 21:24, Oliver Grawert wrote:

> Am Dienstag, den 27.09.2005, 10:43 -0700 schrieb Matt Zimmerman:
>> Given that this seems mostly subjective, and that there are often subtle
>> localization issues involved with changing fonts, let's defer the changes
>> until after the 5.10 release.  Naturally, discussion is still welcome.
> NOOOOO !
> please lets at least ship with a readable default, in hoary bitstream
> vera fonts were the defaults, dont hit our users in the face with a
> blurry default font...we should at least have some consistency and ship
> the same default as in hoary instead of introducing a regression here.
>
> and please dont touch the size settings you'll get a lot of upset web
> designers...

Seconded.  Default Firefox fonts are "sans-serif" and "serif", and you
can see what they resolve to using "fc-match" from fontconfig (it's
not built by default, but it's as simple as gcc `pkg-config --libs
--cflags fontconfig` once you track fc-match.c down :). 

For instance, on my Breezy setup:

$ fc-match serif
NimbusRomNo9L-Regu.pfb: "Nimbus Roman No9 L" "Regular"
уторак, 22:12 : danilo at avet : ~/пошта
$ fc-match sans-serif
NimbusSanL-Regu.pfb: "Nimbus Sans L" "Regular"
уторак, 22:12 : danilo at avet : ~/пошта
$ fc-match monospace
NimbusMonL-Regu.pfb: "Nimbus Mono L" "Regular"

These are all regular gsfonts, and they are not very nice for screen
display (their metrics should match Times, Helvetica and Courier, or,
for "modern" users, those of Times New Roman, Arial and Courier New).


However, this is apparently a bug, since my /etc/fonts/local.conf contains:

	<alias>
		<family>DejaVu Serif</family>
		<family>Bitstream Vera Serif</family>
		<family>Times</family>
		<family>Times New Roman</family>
		<family>Nimbus Roman No9 L</family>
		<family>Luxi Serif</family>
		<family>Kochi Mincho</family>
		<family>AR PL SungtiL GB</family>
		<family>AR PL Mingti2L Big5</family>
		<family>Baekmuk Batang</family>
		<family>FreeSerif</family>
		<default><family>serif</family></default>
	</alias>

I have tried running fc-match with FC_DEBUG=1 and FC_DEBUG=2, but I
don't know how to interpret the data (it ends up evaluating it to
Nimbus Roman, but passing over all the other first).

Cheers,
Danilo