On Thu, 2009-07-09 at 17:55 +0200, Christian Nolte wrote:
Hi,
currently I am working on a website which should be displayed correctly on Linux and Windows using the "Arial"-Font. I've learned that liberation-fonts are the way to go (because they are metric compatible), and discovered a problem with a font-size below 12px. The fonts are rendered with different spaces between the characters independent of the browser, but seemingly dependent of the OS (so I blame the liberation-fonts).
I am not quite sure if there are patent restriction or something else, which prevents liberation-fonts to be exact clones, so it would be nice if someone of you could tell me if this is expected behaviour, or a bug:
Here are some screenshots of the browsers and OS combinations I have tested:
ftp://velian.dyndns.org/pub/nolte/liberation-fonts/ie7-windows.png ftp://velian.dyndns.org/pub/nolte/liberation-fonts/ff-3.5-windows.png ftp://velian.dyndns.org/pub/nolte/liberation-fonts/ff-3.0.11-linux.png
This is the testbed: ftp://velian.dyndns.org/pub/nolte/liberation-fonts/liberation-fonts-test.html
I have only tested this with font-sizes of 12px, 11px and 10px. Below 12px liberation-fonts puts too much spaces between the characters, so that 10px with liberation-fonts is equal to 11px Arial on Windows.
BTW I am currently using liberation-fonts-1.04-1.fc9.noarch. But the problem is visible on a F11-box too.
See Bug 503430 - Incorrect Kerning in some applications https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=503430