It’s all we had, and we was grateful to have ’em! Seven fonts, designing with ’em every day! In the snow!Ĭoding uphill! Both ways! Hand me my spitty cup, and quit yer whining!” Times have moved on, Gramps, and we shouldn’t have to be restricted to using Microsoft’s all-too-familiar fonts to view the Internet in all its fractured glory. Eleven dingy little fonts, and we could only use about seven of ’em. “When I was starting out in Web design,” the old codger grumbles around his plug of chewing tobacco, “all we had was those Microsoft core fonts. You can make an outsized impact among the small but highly engaged community of Linux users making use of your designs, and you can do it without disturbing the typographic sensibilities of your Windows and Mac users.

They might not outdo Windows and Mac users in numbers, but they tend to be more active - and certainly more vocal - than the average Web user. It’s time to let Linux users, in all their variegated versatility, be fairly represented in your font stacks. Most non-designer Linux users tend to have a somewhat motley group of fonts at their disposal. What fonts Linux users (in all their diversity) have depends on a lot of factors, including their particular flavor of operating system, desktop environment, their own interest in expanding their font collections, and so forth. As with so many other aspects of Web design, Linux users are expected to tag along behind the Windows and Mac crowd, doing the best they can with the fonts they have. That’s not true any longer either.īut the perception remains. But that situation has since changed, even though many Web designers still believe fonts designed for (and included with) various Linux flavors are all just icky. In 2003, Linux user and software developer Jeremy Zawodny howled about the dearth of decent fonts for Linux.Īt the time, he was right. One area in which few Linux users see any representation is Web typography.

… Web design should be bulletproof and your choice of type should be no different.” - Jonathan Christopher Linux Users and Web Design

“Many people find Linux to be an afterthought as far as target audience is concerned, but Linux is exponentially increasing in popularity as an alternative to other operating systems.

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