You may have noticed many websites use when they want a sans-serif font : font: arial, helvetica, sans-serif which is wrong, because sans-serif should be replaced by the default sans serif font on the client ans as such should be used by default. However, it is not possible to change millions of websites, while it is possible to change the browsers not to display helvetica when they asked to, but display the default sans serif font. This way, the web pages rendering is consistent with the rest of the desktop, using generally helvetica or FreeSans, and it is quite noticeable when using antialiasing. All major browsers for *nix (mozilla, khtml and gtkhtml) currently use fontconfig/xft2 for rendering, so I guess it is the most convenient place to do that enhancement. Using an alias helvetica->sans-serif (and another alias times->serif) in fonts.conf, this is straightforward. I suggest it (or a more elegant solution leading to the same result) could become the default configuration for fontconfig. This is quite nit-picking, but one of the major blames against GNU/Linux I hear frequently is that the fonts rendering is not nice, especially in browsers. Do you have any comments about that ?
You can easily set up your configuration to do this. I've added stuff to the config file to make this a bit easier.
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