[webkit-gtk] LayoutTest fonts and itchy trigger fingers

[Evan Martin]

On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 8:37 PM, Martin Robinson <mrobinson at webkit.org> wrote:
> 1. Switch to the Liberation fonts and pick two reasonable (redistributable and
> metric compatible hopefully) choices for cursive and fantasy.

So, some background:
The reason we care about metric compatible fonts is because some sites
are designed with assumptions about the pixels sizes of fonts.
Check out the screenshots on bugs like
  http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=32005
Even simple sites like del.icio.us do this!  :(

We concluded it's very important to pick an Arial-sized font when
rendering sites that ask for Arial, since you can't know in advance
how much the site depends on it.  But other font styles (cursive,
fantasy) and even monospace fonts (courier) are less likely to be
relied upon by sites.  (The only one that comes to mind is the way
github does line numbering, but their layout is busted in all sorts of
browsers including Windows Chrome I think.)

So I think the *minimum* you want is metric-compatible for Arial;
maybe Times New Roman to be safe, but for the remaining fonts you can
probably pick anything and no pages will suffer.