Kako su se neki nakon instalacije Kubuntu žalili na fontove, malo bih želio baciti svjetla na tu temu. Naišao sam na ovaj post:
When you say “make fonts look good”, you really mean “make fonts look like I'm used to” - if you were coming from a Mac you'd be asking “how do I prevent my fonts being distorted”.
Font rendering in Windows is heavily aligned to the pixel grid, trading sharp edges for distorted fonts. This corresponds to the “full hinting” option in Appearance→Fonts→Details. You shouldn't have to touch any further configuration.
Font rendering on OS X is the other way around - it does not distort the font shapes, meaning that most glyphs span a pixel boundary. This corresponds to the “none” hinting option.
By default, Ubuntu is somewhere in between - using slight hinting which distorts the fonts a bit to make them fit the pixel-grid better.If you're using an LCD display you should have subpixel antialiasing enabled, regardless of the hinting type.
Dakle, instaliramo ttf-mscorefonts-installer
sudo apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installer
ako smo na Ubuntu uključili Universe repozitorij, zatim ako ne želimo logout-login, učitamo fontove s
sudo fc-cache -fv
uključimo antialiansing ako koristimo LCD, full hinting da strogo prate liniju piksela i to je to.
Inače, patent na Appleov TrueType render je istekao, pa ga može koristiti i FreeType. A zgodna priča je i oko Microsoftovih mscorefonts koja kaže:
msttcorefonts has an amusing history; Microsoft licensed the fonts for anyone to freely use (regardless of OS) to help boost the market share of IE. When they won the first browser wars, they removed the files from their site… but the license says you can freely redistribute them so that’s how we can legally use them
Zanimljivo da grupa tih fontova u debianovom repozitoriju ne sadrži Tahomu. Čak je prijavljen i bug radi toga. Bilo kako bilo, fontovi se mogu ekportirati iz Word 97 Viewera i po EULA-i ne ovise o OS-u.