What fonts do you actually use in linux?

[bailout]

One problem I have always had with *buntu is the number of fonts installed as standard and I think it is getting worse. Any font selection menu in programs such as OOo is full of fonts that I will never use and hence it is difficult to find the ones that I do want. This is made worse after I have installed MS fonts that I need.

I make an attempt to cut them down by getting rid of the ones I definitely don't want but even so I am left with some that I am not sure which to keep. I get rid of all the non-latin scripts. I have listed what I have left below.

The first group are standard fonts that seem to be similar. Not really sure what the differences are between them. DejaVu and freefonts are truetype and nimbus and URW aren't but don't know how much of a disadvantage that is. Any recomendations for or against these. I am tempted to just pick one or two and block the others.

DejaVu family - seem to be a standard font that is chosen for desktop use.

URW - another standard set.

Nimbus - another standard font.

Free font family - Looks to be another alternative standard font.

The rest of the fonts are either single fonts that I don't understand why they were included or specialist fonts that I don't know which apps use or whether I should keep them or can safely block them.

Bitstream Charter - according to wikipedia this was designed to print well on low resolution laser printers so I may keep this as I have an old HP laserjet.

Century Schoolbook L - Apparantly used in American children's books Any reason to keep?

cmex10, cmmi10, cmr10, cmsy10 - These seem to be mathematical fonts. I have no idea why these are installed as standard or what apps use them. Hence I don't know what will break if I block them.

Courier 10 pitch - Just looks to be a standard font family. Not sure what its advantage is or why it is included?

Dingbats - funny symbol font. I will probably keep although I have never used and don't really know how to.

msam10, msbm10 - more mathematical fonts, maybe connected to latex? Again I don't know what needs these so not sure whether it is safe to block?

Open Symbol - another set of symbols.

Purisa - This looks like a handwritten style font although the only references I can find to suggest it is a thai font.

Symbols and Standard Symbols - More symbols but I can't see any difference between these two. Anyone know what the difference is?

Waree - another thai font that shows latin script in the preview. I did see see a couple of recommendations for this as a general font.

wasy10 - another symbol font for latex? Not sure what this is installed for.


Any help on this appreciated. I could just block all the fonts I am not sure about and unblock them later if needed but I would prefer to understand what they are for first.

thanks

[Ole Juul]

Re: What fonts do you actually use in linux?

I agree that there are too many fonts. Not too many years ago a good commercial printer just starting out, would be able to get along on as little as 4 fonts. Nowadays an amateur computer user needs 400. Obviously there has been a serious change in skill level over the years.

Good for you for tackling this. For myself I usually block all the sans-serif fonts because I don't know of a good reason to use them. I would delete more "useless" fonts if I wanted to spend the time that you are doing now. Since I prefer clear and easy to read fonts, I do use the Century Schoolbook font. In fact, that and Georgia are my standard fonts. Some other traditional fonts (eg. Kennerly and Bodoni sorts) that I like are not available for free. Perhaps my perceived need to have well defined fonts comes from my old involvement with actual traditional type setting and letterpress printing. Your interests might be different, so go with that.

For inspiration, I'll leave you with a quote from Ralph W. Polk in "The Practice of Printing" ((1926): "The object of type is to get itself read."

[Zorael]

Re: What fonts do you actually use in linux?

In an attempt to make things look similar to as they do on Windows, I mostly use Times New Roman and Arial for content (web pages, documents). For UI elements I use the DejaVu family, and for CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) characters I use the non-free Kochi set from the repos (-naga10), for their greater Unicode bitmap coverage.

I have the Serif, Sans-serif and Monospace virtual fonts set up to use Times, Arial and DejaVu Sans Mono primarily, and then fall back onto Kochi Mincho, Gothic and Gothic respectively for Unicode. It works nicely in most apps, the exception being Chromium that seems to largely ignore fontconfig settings.

[askrieger]

Re: What fonts do you actually use in linux?

The reason that *buntu is delivered with a great many fonts that you never heard of is to make the distro accessible to people who read languages that are not written with iso-8859-1 (latin-1) characters. Otherwise, total noobs would be instantly faced with the problem of downloading fonts for their location before the install even started.

In addition, I recently (Karmic) did a fresh install on one of my machines. I split the installation over a couple of days. When I finally got around to stripping out useless fonts, the other day, I found that there were two groups of installation times. One was the fonts installed with the OS. The other consisted of fonts installed with Openoffice. Oo.o uses it's own font collection and, of course, installs all the locales for the same reason that Canonical does.