Technology Tales

Adventures & experiences in contemporary technology

A different Firefox II: cross-platform font display issues

18th November 2007

One of the things that I have been sorting out on this blog is how the fonts appear in Firefox running on Ubuntu. Even with the same fonts and the same browser, serif fonts were being displayed smaller and appeared more fuzzy in Linux than in Windows. And that’s even with the font sharpening that comes with turning on Ubuntu’s visual effects. So, there was a spot of swapping between Ubuntu and Windows (running on VMware) while I was increasing font sizes to make legibility better on the Linux side without things going all Blue Peter on Windows. Along the way, I added a mention of the Ubuntu font ae_AlArabiya in the CSS to further spruce up things. In my earlier web building efforts, I was having to make serif fonts bigger because of those serifs. From the on-screen legibility point of view, there’s a lot to be said for sans serif fonts and I may yet alter this blog’s theme to use them instead but I’ll ponder the idea a bit more before taking the plunge.

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