117294 - arial first in css & mozilla: the web looks bad.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 104075

(SeaMonkey :: General, defect)

Description

[Peter J. Braam]

Issue: I'd like web pages on Linux to look as great as on Windows.

Many, I mean _really_ many - like 90% of all, CSS style sheets put:

fonts: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;

Arial renders badly on Linux, Helvetica badly on Windows; one gets
good rendering on both with sans-serif first.  To see what I mean
compare:

www.linux.com
www.clusterfs.com

Could Mozilla map Arial to Helvetica instead of using an ugly font? My system
is a "pure" RedHat + Ximian system: ttfonts package is installed. 

My mozilla is 0.9.6.

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

It seems like the correct thing to do here would be to convince distributions to 
include a non-ugly Arial font...

For what it's worth anyone who's using the Microsoft-provided Arial font in 
their Linux setup (yes, distributions cannot do this by default) will not have 
this problem...

Comment 2

[kill this account]

I believe arial is already mapped to fallback to helvetica

http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/gfx/src/gtk/nsFontMetricsGTK.cpp

536 static nsFontFamilyName gFamilyNameTable[] =
537 {
538   { "arial",           "helvetica" },
539   { "courier new",     "courier" },
540   { "times new roman", "times" },
541 

We could inhibit ugly fonts via font banning, bug 104075.

Comment 3

[timeless]

my thoughts exactly. after font banning is implemented, redhat can include 
arial in their list.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 104075 ***

Comment 4

[kill this account]

so can we get a sr= for bug 104075?