Comment 20 for bug 41411

I must admit that it was a bit of a shocker today upgrading to hardy and attempting to visit my favorite web sites (or not so favorite applications I have to work on) to discover that many of them were defaulting to this hideous unknown font if one was not explicitly set that the default hardy install likes.

For instance, visiting this web site should make the ugly font in question very obvious:

http://planetapache.org/

The creator of that particular blog-roll package (and site maintainer) even mentions this casually here:

http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2008/03/21/Hardy-Heron-Beta-on-T61P

I'm sure everyone is well aware of the differences in rendering. Maybe a small set of common aliases for things like verdana,arial,helvetica,etc were there in fiesty but not in hardy. If that is the case - I might suggest that this decision be re-thought. There are a ~lot~ of web sites I browse in my daily crawls that revert to said ugly font and it's doubtful all of them will notice my pain and change their css stylesheets to reflect this. (though I can fix my own ugliness at tapestry.apache.org thankfully)

I don't even remember what the default font setup was like in feisty anymore because after installing whatever black magic is contained here - http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=343670 - I never had to think about it again.

Don't get me wrong, the fonts look ok enough but the differences between the default rendering here and that in os x/windows/etc is enough to make me seriously consider moving to a different platform for my dev box just to be on the safe side. (i've tried ms true type fonts on many occasions with many different distros and have never liked the results. the letter spacing is always wrong even if the the characters are rendered correctly individually) Thankfully my code editor was already using Bitstream Vera Sans which is still around so that part of my day hasn't been traumatized too much.

sorry if I sound negative, am only sharing pragmatic facts and such. think you guys are doing a great job and will hope for the best