NewsForge: A Font Primer for Linux

“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…”

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