Yesterday I found an article on digital rights management on the GNU web site. The article itself is interesting, although IMHO a little bit too biased towards the “see how many freedoms they could take away from us” angle — but that’s the way RMS thinks. However, I was disappointed to see that the article — the entire www.gnu.org site, in fact — was using the Bitstream Vera Sans font. Here’s the relevant part from the style sheet, and note the comment:
font-family: "Bitstream Vera Sans", sans-serif; /* favour free fonts!! */
Now don’t get me wrong, I like the Bitstream Vera fonts just as much as you do and I use them extensively, not just because they’re free, but because they do indeed look quite good — at least on Linux. But I was reading that article from the office on a Windows XP machine and the Bitstream Vera fonts don’t look good there, or at least not as good as Verdana. Anyway, that’s not the real point: if one prefers a different font, perhaps just as free like Isabella, what can (s)he do?
The funny part is, Stallman’s own site (http://www.stallman.org) doesn’t force you to use free fonts…