Linux Libertine

Posted Jun 20, 2012 17:33 UTC (Wed) by walex (guest, #69836)
In reply to: Linux Libertine by kramal
Parent article: Liberation fonts and the tricky task of internationalization

«commercial fonts are of higher quality than the community-built fonts».

Does that perception really exist for Linux Libertine? It's one of the most beautiful general-use fonts that I know (including for-pay fonts).

Here almost certainly "quality" refers to "on-screen quality", that is how well the font renders at much low DPI than printing.

This used to require extensive hinting, especially for TrueType fonts, and hinting TTF used to require special expensive tools, and a large amount of tedious work, and thus as a rule only commercial fonts, like the Microsoft Web Fonts, were well-hinted.

Various Linux suppliers have been in recent years paying foundries to improve the hinting of the fonts they sponsor, the free FontForge tool now makes hinting easier, and as a result some freeware fonts are not somewhat well hinted for low DPI, notably DejaVu, in my impression.

Linux Libertine

Posted Jun 21, 2012 9:23 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

The big ugly secret is that Microsoft web fonts were *not* well-hinted.

To get good web font rendering in windows microsoft had to workaround those web font bugs in the font rendering stack of windows of the time

That's why :
1. microsoft web fonts look ugly anywhere else (it's not the other font stacks which are bad it's the font themselves which have buggy hints)
2. other fonts (with clean hints) look bad on windows when they trigger web-font specific workarounds they don't need