I’m against making default aliases for these fonts, for two reasons: 1. The proposed fonts to replace the MS fonts are not clones of the MS fonts. They do not look similar and do not have similar metrics. Aliases should be used only as a means of providing actual font clones or generic names, not for pretending that a font is present when it’s really unavailable and substituting a very-different font in the same style.
2. While some websites have ugly fallbacks, like the bug report mentions, other sites use the CSS font selection system correctly. Creating an alias for Arial prevents the browser from gracefully falling back to another font that the page designer intended and forces the browser to use a font that was not intended. Point #1 could be fixed by aliasing Arial to FreeSans (a near-perfect Helvetica clone, which Arial also is), Times New Roman to FreeSerif (Times clone), etc. However, this escalates the problem of point #2, since there are websites that do things like: font-family: Arial, Bitstream Vera Sans, Sans-serif; And Linux users would probably much appreciate getting the fallback to Bitstream Vera Sans here, since it actually has hinting (unlike FreeSans). Unless someone else sees a way around the above problems, I’m (as a Debian user, no one special) against aliasing the MS font names. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
