Despite my best efforts to keep my home computing environment Microsoft free – OK I do have a Windows 7 Media Centre I admit! – I have found myself quite impartial to the new fonts Microsoft have introduced with Windows Vista and Office 2007. Constantia, Corbel, Calibri, Cambria, Candara and Consolas are beautiful modern fonts which look great on screen.

A while ago, I decided to install these fonts on my Linux Mint desktop by copying them from my Windows 7 installation to the /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/ directory (may as well keep them with the rest of my Microsoft Core fonts!). However, I found that the hinting for these fonts looked terrible in Linux when displayed at the typical smaller sizes of text in emails and websites.

To fix this, add the following code to your ~/.fonts.conf file and log out/back in again:

<match target="font" >
 <edit name="embeddedbitmap" mode="assign">
  <bool>false</bool>
 </edit>
</match>