I tried changing default serif, sans, and mono fonts in konqueror to Liberation family. Boy, what an improvement that was especially in appearance of popular websites: yahoo, cnn, etc!!! How about making this default for konqueror for Fedora 8. I would, however, like to keep DejaVu family as default for menus/titles/toolbars too. How about putting this here /usr/share/kde-settings/kde-profile/default/share/config/konquerorrc ? Thanks!
We'll continue to use what fedora uses as the default for serif, sans, mono. So, the best approach here, imo, would be to lobby for *those* defaults to be changed. Reassigning -> fontconfig Mind you, there's way more at stake here than just looks e.g. language, character coverage.
Firefox *already* uses Liberation family displaying www.yahoo.com, www.cnn.com, bbcnews.com, etc., because fontconfig *already* aliases Times New Roman, Arial, and Courier to Liberation family (/etc/fonts/conf.d/30-aliases-fedora.conf). So, I am guessing, konqueror is happy to find sans-serif in css, even though arial is the first choice there. Firefox attempts to find arial first, trusts fontconfig to do so, and succeeds. I don't know which is best approach, but Firefox now looks so much better than konqueror. As far as unicode coverage goes. Liberation family covers 654 glyphs including basic and extended latin, greek, and cyrillic. This is indeed less than ~1500 in standard MS fonts or DejaVu, but pretty good. Maybe, it is too early to switch konqueror to Liberation family by default, but I will keep my own new settings. I hope that the availability of these MS-metric-compatible fonts will be reflected in the release notes of the fedora-kde spin or something.
(In reply to comment #2) > > So, I am guessing, konqueror is happy to find sans-serif in css, even though > arial is the first choice there. And thus it's not a problem in distro font choices but a problem in kde code > As far as unicode coverage goes. Liberation family covers 654 glyphs including > basic and extended latin, greek, and cyrillic. This is indeed less than ~1500 > in standard MS fonts or DejaVu, but pretty good. Actually dejavu sans has ~ 5000 glyphs at last count, so there's almost a 10× difference (and the default has been dejavu lgc sans which is smaller but the default is likely to change for F9). Not that's the only or most important factor in the default font choice, but it's one of them. Moreover you can ask for changes/fixes in dejavu and get them a month later, whereas the whole fedora → red hat → ascender circuit has till to prove it could treat a single request.
I am leaning to the same conclusion now. This is a konqueror oversight. - A website should know better when it requests Arial. Arial should then give enough unicode coverage and, most likely, so should Liberation Sans. - When a page requests Sans rather than Arial, DejaVu is a better choice. - On an international desktop, DajaVu is better, because of better coverage. So the current configuration is pretty reasonable. Liberation is a substitute for Microsoft fonts and that is it. It is not a universal desktop font. Konqueror is wrong ignoring Arial in favor of Sans-serif. The konqueror behavior is unlikely to change before KDE4.
I have been told that konqueror relies on what fc-list returns, and that does not contain aliases. If it relied on fc-match, that would be better. So FcFontMatch is the way to go.
anyone take this issue upstream yet (ie, bugs.kde.org, etc... )?
I've raised the issue on kde-devel and got acknoledgement from coolo. The best wat to deal with it is to bug whoever wrote konqueror font selection, which works but has to be changed. I haven't filed a bug report yet.
coolo mentioned this oooold bug http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57485
Vote for the upstream bug! http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57485
OK, we'll continue to track this upstream.