Comment 21 for bug 412195

I agree with Eric, it's nothing to do with Tahoma as such: Karmic simply renders all fonts using embedded bitmaps where they are available. Did this used to happen? I don't remember having the problem before.

Most embedded bitmaps are much worse renderings that what FreeType would naturally produce, simply because they're not anti-aliased. I think Ubuntu should set embeddedbitmaps false as default, and only turn it on for the packaged CJK fonts that really need it (because their hinting isn't sufficiently good to make the characters readable at smaller sizes).