While browsing recently I came across reference to the Redhat Liberation Fonts, and a number of favorable reviews of the quality of the fonts. Since they are genuine Open Source fonts I decided to install them on my laptop.

This was dead easy ad the fonts are installable with emerge…

angus ~ # emerge liberation-fonts-ttf
 
...
 
>>> No packages selected for removal by clean
>>> Auto-cleaning packages...
 
>>> No outdated packages were found on your system.
 
 * Messages for package media-fonts/liberation-fonts-ttf-3-r1:
 
 * To substitute Liberation fonts for Microsoft equivalents, use:
 *   cd /etc/fonts/conf.d/ && ln -sf ../conf.avail/60-liberation.conf .
 * GNU info directory index is up-to-date.
angus ~ #

Having done the emerge I took note of the “Message” and followed the instructions to get the substitution.

Disaster struck — suddenly pages in Firefox looked dreadful with oversized, unclear fonts, broken page layouts etc.

I quickly undid the “replacement” step, rebooted and all returned to normal.

Now I can still select the Liberation fonts where I want them and agree that they are high quality fonts that scale well.

I don’t know what the replacement tried to do, or why the outcome was so bad. Until I find out, I’ll be satisfied to explicitly use the fonts (have set them to be the default in applications such as konsole).