Strike One

I use openSUSE as my main operating system on my laptop. I don’t like how Microsoft fonts are being rendered in Linux, but I have to have them installed anyway for compability reasons. This brings a dilemma as most websites use Arial and Verdana as their default fonts in their stylesheets messing with my optimal website viewing experience. One of the places like this was my fastmail.fm e-mail account.

Here’s the deal with me and my font preferences: Most of the times, I don’t like anti-aliasing. I don’t think it adds anything, creates extra blurriness, and takes up more space than it otherwise would on the screen. I like pretty, non-antialiased fonts for most purposes. One of the best fonts is Helvetica bitmap – this font just looks good, is extremely concise, sharp and very easy to read. Unfortunately, most websites use CSS files that do not respect your default font selection and force ugly Arial and Verdana on their users.

One of these websites is fastmail.fm e-mail service. Even though it has a configurable stylesheet selection most selectable pre-made stylesheets are forcing, like many other sites, Arial and Verdana as default fonts. Now, I don’t want to completely uninstall these fonts, but I don’t want them to be used as defaults in any application.

The solution for fixing this in fastmail is simple – create your own stylesheet. Here is how it works: download one of the stylesheets that you want to base your work upon; delete Arial and Verdana fonts, leaving Helvetica and sans-serif as only selections left; upload the file to your fastmail.fm files in the “styles” directory; create a website for that directory by clicking on a link next to it; name your css file as custom-fm.css; now go to your preferences and in the stylesheet selection select “custom from filestorage”. That’s it – I can use my stylesheet with my color and font preferences without having to uninstall Arial and Verdana fonts just in case I need them.

Fastmail.fm service is cool in this regard – allowing users this, among other, flexibilities. I am strongly considering paying for the service. Besides, like the name says – it’s also very fast and works from almost any browser.