| Connect jimfhall
Minnesota
Jim Hall is an open source software advocate and developer, best known for usability testing in GNOME and as the founder + project coordinator of FreeDOS. At work, Jim is CEO of Hallmentum, an IT executive consulting company that provides hands-on IT Leadership training, workshops, and coaching.
Authored Comments
I work on the FreeDOS Project and we have a page that tries to help new developers get started with their contribution. It lists things you can do based on different levels of experience: no developer experience, some programming experience, lots of development experience.
http://www.freedos.org/contribute/
Great article! Good fonts are important for the Linux desktop experience. I have a few favorite fonts that I use on my system at home. For example, when writing documents, I often set body text to EB Garamond and headings to a sans serif font like Cantarell.
At home, I have decided to be completely non-proprietary. And that means I prefer to avoid Microsoft's fonts. At the same time, I don't want to miss out on the web experience; when I visit a website that specifies the core fonts, I want to get those fonts. I want to get the same experience as was intended for other desktops. It would be great if websites used downloadable fonts so all visitors always see the intended font, but not every site does this. Because the core fonts are so ubiquitous among proprietary desktops (Windows and Mac) many websites default to these fonts.
So I use other fonts, and set aliases from the core fonts to those other fonts. They didn't need to be completely perfect replicas, but representative of the font so that using the replacement effected the spirit of original. I think it's a pretty nice setup.
It would be interesting to hear your thoughts on what free fonts make a suitable replacement for the common Microsoft Core Fonts for the Web.