Finding fonts that looked right in Mozilla on Linux used to be a pain, whereas today that seemingly little issue is far behind us. Now I want the fonts on my work machine running XP to look as nice. With a little help from Microsoft’s ClearType Tuner and this font combination, I’ve found the sweet spot! I’ve been involved with Mozilla since almost the very beginning. I first developed an update script during the M20 milestone days of Mozilla in 2000, but one of the ongoing challenges was finding a font combination that looked good in Linux. Back before the availability of the Bitstream fonts and other open source fonts as options, and if you had some fonts that would look good, the secondary ones wouldn’t. It was a pain, but with Linux fonts nowadays, this is no longer an issue, they look fantastic. While running XP at work (it’s one of those I have to deals) it never looked quite as nice as at home under Linux. Today I found out that I actually like this current setting over any that I’ve previously tried under Window, so I thought I’d share it in case it helps others, or simply to remind myself. Here are the settings on the panel ‘Options’ > ‘Tools’ > ‘Content’
And then the next one, after you click on the ‘Advanced’ button
These settings and screenshots are in XP running on an LCD monitor at 1280×1024. Oh, and if you’re running XP, you MUST install or activate ClearType Tuner from Microsoft; it’s free, it’s amazing and it makes the fonts look almost as good as they do in Linux! If you have a different combination, please share in the comments section.