Whether preserving layouts or having good looking fonts in web pages is more important is just a matter of opinion. I noticed it looking at a page in Firefox. I rarely use Open Office, and that's not where I first noticed it. I'm actually not arguing it from a office app perspective. The real problem is that there different fonts have different levels of hinting, and there's no good default setting that optimizes all the different fonts. but if you make every site that specifies Arial look like crap, then you're going to get a lot more complaints, since there are a lot of them.Ĭan metric equivalent aliasing be made optional? Given that OO and other programs have historically had problems with fonts, I don't think people have high expectations. The difference in quality is quite striking. I'm don't think that having metric-compatible results should be preferred over having fonts that look good under the default settings. This in combination with Nimbus Sans getting used for all kinds of websites gives an ugly result. The problem here is that the default Gnome Desktop is set to 'full' hinting. I know about all the hinting settings, but that's not the problem here.

The only good hinted fonts that are available by default are the DejaVu series and the Bitstream series (essentially the same font).

Arial font metrics