"Like most people, I've generally taken fonts for granted over the years. You hit a key, a letter appears on screen--no magic involved. That was pure ignorance on my part; when I first switched to Linux it surprised me how much was involved in getting that character up on the screen.
"As recently as two years ago, the average deployed Linux system had inconsistent font support--some applications were not able to access all the installed fonts on the system, some applications were incapable of anti-aliasing, and a user trying to sort it out quickly became mired in an alphabet soup of confusingly-similar terms: TrueType, OpenType, FreeType, Type 1, et cetera..."
