wine font changes system look and feel

[Kamil Paral]

Andreas wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> first I would like to point out that I am totally open for a
> discussion
> about this. IMO bugzilla is just not the right place for it.

Thanks, that's great.

Chris wrote:
> Well, no they don't.  They are requesting the font Microsoft calls
> Tahoma, not a Wine-provided imitation of Tahoma.

I didn't know that wine-provided Tahoma is not exactly the same as Microsoft Tahoma. I just knew it looked horrible. That is an important information, thank you. From now on I'll write "wine-Tahoma" when talking about wine-provided Tahoma to make it clear.

Chris wrote:
> Providing a font called Tahoma that isn't Tahoma is a bad idea.  In
> general, the fonts that are designed to copy other fonts get a different
> name.  In many cases, this is required because some font names are
> trademarked (IIRC Helvetica is an example).
> 
> Wine should not call their font Tahoma.  They should call it something
> else and then map requests for Tahoma to their imitation font.

Is someone knowledgeable enough to put all the details and information together and open a ticket in wine bug-tracker? I can do it, but since I know nothing about fonts, my bug description might not explain the issue properly.

Felix wrote:
> It happens because:
> 
> 1-Microsoft's TTF fonts are not in the browser's font path
> 
> 2-a poor imitation of Tahoma named Tahoma is in the browser's font
> path
> 
> 3-Clueless web authors include Tahoma as a fallback to Verdana, which
> is not
> part of a standard Wine install, while the Tahoma impostor is

This is a nice summary. Now, are we able to circumvent other people's mistakes and obstacles?

I have to stress out one very important thing in case someone missed it: It is extremely easy to make a font available only to wine itself, it has a special directory for that. No other applications would see it.

Andreas wrote:
> As a packager I, however, find it important that for the
> use-case of wine the best available user experience is provided.
> Hence
> this font needs to be included an pulled in by wine like it is
> today.

Let's assume we have moved wine-Tahoma to wine-specific font directory:
1. Wine users experience stays the same - all wine applications are still rendered correctly
2. General users experience improves - web browser doesn't display a lot of favorite web pages (like Facebook) with an ugly-looking font

Now, what is wrong about that?

Andreas, if there are packaging guidelines that would be broken, I'm sure we can receive an exception. I can find out the correct approach and I will gladly help you discuss that with relevant people.
If you are afraid there might be people out there who want wine-Tahoma as a system font, it is important to realize that those people are probably just a tiny fraction of the other side of the argument (users who prefer good-looking websites) and we can easily adjust the README to explain how to make the font user-wide or system-wide if required (together with a note that this is *not* Microsoft Tahoma and final appearance will differ).

Or is there any other reason why you feel reluctant to make wine-Tahoma available only to wine by default?

Thanks.