A howl on the wind…

I’ve finally had enough of looking at Bitstream Vera, so I uninstalled it. I had previously merely changed the system default to Tahoma via the MS TTF core fonts, which helped immensely, but then today I stumbled upon the Try KDE page. For some reason, they have hard-coded their site to use Bitstream Vera. I suppose it makes KDE users feel at home.

I recognize that it is a free full-featured font, and as such it is nearly their only choice for distributions, but I just can’t stand it any longer. I find it to severely lack polish; some parts of letters are visibly thicker than other, and in odd places. The second font in the KDE.org list of acceptable fonts is Lucida Grande, so I tested out how it would look in that…

Comparison with Lucida Grande

• The Try KDE page in Bitstream Vera Sans (png)
• The Try KDE page in Lucida Grande (png)
• Single word: , Bitstream Vera Sans.
• Single word: , Lucida Grande
• Single word: , edited from Bitstream Vera Sans to show how it needs to be polished. All I did was remove the extra pixels in the letters S, c, e, and o. But even so, e still looks off-balance.

Should be noted that I do not use font anti-aliasing as I find it makes all text on the screen very blurry, plus I can clearly see the sub-pixel adjustments making all letters have hazy colored outlines. Doesn’t matter what engine is used (even MS’s ClearType), it only makes reading on the screen impossible. I did test whether anti-aliasing would help with Bitstream Vera’s problem, but no, it only made it much worse.

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