I’m asking for an article I’m putting together, and I’d like whatever feedback you’d care to provide. Basically, do you put Linux fonts in your font stacks? Do you design with Linux fonts in mind? Do you deal with Linux users at all in your typographical choices? What’s your take?
Any responses, long or short, are very welcome.
Agree with you Stomme,
I this article images is great help which will help since we can just decide at instant.
I will try to keep this thing in my coming up design I will defiantly try to make it optimized for Linux user too.
Gawd I love that font. I’m currently going through a phase where I’m totally overusing it for absolutely everything, lawlz : )
The article does not mention distros polled. I have all the fonts they list, meaning a high proportion of Ubuntu or other Gnome-windowed Linuces were polled. The MS fonts at the bottom are representing the ~70% of Linux users who have downloaded the msttcorefonts. I don’t make any consideration for those when I’m making font stacks: I make for windows/mac, then linux fonts, then default, except when there’s a Linux font I love (like urw gothic) or a funky mac font (like marker felt) that I’d like to have precedence if possible.
The below is useful for Linux typefaces, the statistics are independently collected and seem to reflect typeface availability (though nothing is a sure thing). I try to account for Linux myself, though I agree that it’s an afterthought for most people due to it’s lack of a standard when it comes to install conventions. 
http://www.codestyle.org/css/font-family/sampler-UnixResults.shtml
I seem to have all fonts on that list minus the Lucida ones, which is cool.
Also, who knows what fonts come with OpenOffice?
So far as I know, if comes with whatever fonts you have in your /home/you/.fonts folder or your . Same with GIMP.
Most people seem to like to import their favourite fonts into OO.
Bitstream Vera come with Gnome, so any flavour of Linux with the Gnome desktop should have them.
Yes, APC is ubuntu-centric, however after finding most of those fonts on Fedora and openSuse I felt ok using them. There’s always a generic family name at the back anyway. Mostly, I bother setting fonts so that everyone in the stack is approx the same size (so lucida grande with verdana etc).
I have mscorefonts installed, so I have a handful of versions of Windows fonts - Arial, Verdana, etc.
To be honest, I’m actually quite ignorant about Linux fonts. My computer is set to use UnDotum, but I’m not sure if that’s something that’s come with my distro (Ubuntu) or something that got installed by a downloaded theme.
Apart from that, I’m quite happy to see everything in the basic boring Windows fonts, or plain old sans-serif.
All of you Linux users – Poes and Karpie, thanks for weighing in, and I wish Tommy would add his bit – please let me know what fonts you use both on your computers and in your designs. Anyone know of a list that tells what fonts come with what distros? The page on APaddedCell is useful, but dated and Ubuntu-centric. Also, who knows what fonts come with OpenOffice?
Logic_Earth, there’s the Nimbus family, the DejaVu family, the Liberation family (my personal favorites), the obsolete Bitstream Veras, the Free fonts, the Luxi fonts, and others either created specifically for Linux users or distributed with one Linux flavor or the other. The article will go into some detail on each one.
I use Linux fonts, all the time. URW fonts are popular. Also Bitstream, Deja Vu, Free*.
Logic_earth hinted at an important point though: Linux comes in many distros. Some distros deliver fonts, some don’t. The more stallmanesque they are, the more likely they will only offer totally free-as-in-speech fonts if any.
Max, as a visual aid I use this (aging) page: http://www.apaddedcell.com/web-fonts
I use it to eyeball sizes when making my stacks. Ubuntu !=Linux but it is a very popular distro and Fedora and OpenSuse are very similar and also come default with the Gnome windowing system.
I don’t include Linux fonts, because I don’t know what the options are, or what’s likely to be popularly available, or what will work well in the context of my design. I’m guessing (although I don’t know) that most Linux fonts aren’t available for 'Doze users, so I can’t at the moment try them out. I don’t want to specify fonts if I don’t know what they are going to do!
Plus, Tommy said that one of the things he likes about browsing on Linux is that most people don’t set any Linux fonts in their stack, so he gets to read all websites using his preferred font. And keeping Tommy happy is Very Important (:
Well seeing as most Linux distros do not come (by default) with Arial or others like it. The web safe isn’t entirely “safe” when you being Linux into the mix.
* Using the name Linux loosely. Take it as you will.
I think the reason behind this is normally when we design a website we don’t think of linux users.
Could you elaborate a bit as to which linux fonts exist?
I’ve always assumed the “web safe” fonts also work on linux. Is that assumption incorrect?
Never, and I’m even a Linux user myself.
Honestly when it comes to Linux you are better off just using “san-serif” and the like. There are so many variations you could not be sure that user a has the same fonts as user b even if they are on the same distro.
Hmm, the message is quite clear. Linux users get no love…
thank you for sharing a link this article was very helpful for me I have never tried to think about the Linux user font compatibility.
Dijup: what I like about it is that there are images of the fonts, so I can just look at all of them and eyeball them for size-matching.
For example, you would not want to have a stack with calibri (a small Windows font) with Verdana (a large Windows font) as this can screw with your page, depending on how brittle you sized things. Since I size containers often in em’s, I really care about having the fonts in the stack all match approximately in size. Big with big, small with small.