As some of you may have noticed an old bug has sprung to life again on the installation of Karmic Koala (Ubuntu 9.10). While installing a fresh 9.10 the default Tahoma font performs terrible on LCD displays with sub pixel rendering. It cannot display bold text anymore.
ttf-mscorefonts-installer is responsible for installing your standard set of non-free Microsoft fonts. This is a general recommendation. However as of lately it does not include Tahoma. ttf-tahoma-replacement was developed by the wine team and ported as a separate package for Karmic. It provides a Tahoma replacement with all the correct metrics etc. But it is unable to render a correct bold font when the user enables Sub Pixel Rendering.
This affects among other things:
- Web sites
- Office tools
- GUI
- More specific: Zimbra mail
The solution is to either uninstall ttf-tahoma-replacement which will result in other fonts being used instead (such as Arial) or to install Microsoft’s version of Tahoma which is available in multiple packages and installations.
I have found this nifty script doing the job:
#!/bin/bash
[ ! -f /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/tahoma.ttf -o ! -f /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/tahomabd.ttf ] &&
wget http://download.microsoft.com/download/ie6sp1/finrel/6_sp1/W98NT42KMeXP/EN-US/IELPKTH.CAB &&
cabextract -F 'tahoma*ttf' IELPKTH.CAB &&
mkdir -p /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/ &&
mv -f tahoma*ttf /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/ &&
chmod 644 /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/tahoma* &&
fc-cache -v &&
rm -f IELPKTH.CAB &&
echo "Installed Tahoma"
Copy/paste it and run it as root. It will fetch a cab file from IE6, extract it and install the missing Tahoma font.