Bye bye, Helvetica
Categories: [ IT ]
I have used Helvetica as the sole font in WindowMaker for the past 12 years (AFAICR). I recently upgraded to Debian Lenny and switched from Mozilla 1.7 to Firefox 3.5 (at last!) I managed to setup my system to use the Helvetica bitmap font, which looks much nicer than Nimbus Sans (the Type 1 equivalent) in WindoMaker, and I was happy. But I discovered that Firefox now (AFAICT) prints Helvetica text using the Helvetica bitmap font, which produces very ugly documents. Mozilla was somehow smart enough to use vector fonts for that, but not Firefox. Helvetica seems to be something of the past :(
So I switched to DejaVu fonts for WindowMaker and Nimbus for GTK applications and Firefox. It's so sad.
[ Posted on July 7th, 2009 at 12:00 | 1 comment | permanent link ]
I didn't need to say bye bye to Helvetica after all. The least bad compromise seems to be using the bitmap Helvetica font for GUI anyway, and set Firefox to use DejaVu fonts without allowing web sites to decide what font to use (I don't have anything besi