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My fonts are better than yours

Tuesday, January 31, 2006 ★ 22:50 ★ Categories Gnome, Programming

Most websites use stylesheets that specify which font-family should be used for rendering the page. While this is fine in most cases, it gets really annoying if you need to read a text in a font that’s typeset in a font you don’t like. Comic Sans comes to mind, but I’m not seeing that one anymore: I simply purged the file from my system. Remember, only you can stop bunny-punching!

Most browsers offer a way to specify the default fall-back fonts. I’ve configured my browser of choice (Epiphany is much better than Firefox in my opinion) to use Minion Web Pro, a beautiful, legible and, above all, really well-hinted serif font. It’s great for on-screen reading.

Most browsers also offer a way that lets you always use your own fonts (ignore stylesheet hints). It’s not so nice for everyday use, but I use it quite a lot when reading longer online texts. As expected, the checkbox in Epiphany is hidden in the preferences dialog. That’s annoying if you want to flip the switch quickly.

Luckily, Epiphany provides a really nice extension system (install epiphany-extensions to use the extensions). Reinout van Schouwen started by transforming some sample code and produced a basic Python extension that adds an item to the View menu. He also blogged about it. I’ve improved the extension by making it a checkbox that tracks the config setting and sets it to the correct value at startup. It totally rocks:

Always use own fonts

I’ve put up a bzr branch over here in the geek section. You can also just download the two files over there and save them into ~/.gnome2/epiphany/extensions/. Create the directory if it’s not there, but don’t put the files into a subdirectory. The next time you start Epiphany it will appear in the Extension dialog. Enable and enjoy!