Font-Size Problem with liberation-fonts

[Christian Nolte]

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Hi,

currently I am working on a website which should be displayed correctly
on Linux and  Windows using the "Arial"-Font. I've learned that
liberation-fonts are the way to go (because they are metric compatible),
and discovered a problem with a font-size below 12px. The fonts are
rendered with different spaces between the characters independent of the
browser, but seemingly dependent of the OS (so I blame the
liberation-fonts).

I am not quite sure if there are patent restriction or something else,
which prevents liberation-fonts to be exact clones, so it would be nice
if someone of you could tell me if this is expected behaviour, or a bug:

Here are some screenshots of the browsers and OS combinations I have tested:

ftp://velian.dyndns.org/pub/nolte/liberation-fonts/ie7-windows.png
ftp://velian.dyndns.org/pub/nolte/liberation-fonts/ff-3.5-windows.png
ftp://velian.dyndns.org/pub/nolte/liberation-fonts/ff-3.0.11-linux.png

This is the testbed:
ftp://velian.dyndns.org/pub/nolte/liberation-fonts/liberation-fonts-test.html

I have only tested this with font-sizes of 12px, 11px and 10px. Below
12px liberation-fonts puts too much spaces between the characters, so
that 10px with liberation-fonts is equal to 11px Arial on Windows.

BTW I am currently using liberation-fonts-1.04-1.fc9.noarch. But the
problem is visible on a F11-box too.

Thanks for looking at it.
Best regards,
Christian

- --
"He's a benighted misogynist astronaut fleeing from a secret government
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