Not any Helvetica I know

Just after I swore I would use my Linux box at home for real work rather than constantly battling with configuration and upkeep I’ve spent about two hours tonight trying to get any web page using the Helvetica font not to look like total arse (read: aliased) in Firefox. It turns out that, at least in a standard Gentoo distribution, applications that ask Fontconfig for Helvetica will get a lame arse low resolution bitmap font that lives in the /usr/share/font/75dpi directory. The Fontconfig utility fc-match is useful in situations like these.

After trialling numerous successful ways of getting the system to select a different font instead, it turns out the easiest way to avoid this situation is to sym link the no bitmap font configuration file into the Fontconfig configuration directory.

After this is completed, fc-match tells me a much happier story.

Where “Nimbus Sans L” is a very nice, Helvetica like, truetype font. Hope this knowledge may save someone the same two hour torment and distraction from other, more interesting tasks such as learning Scala (oh you know, just purely for example, maybe).