OS News reports that Microsoft have stopped making a number of its fonts freely available for download. This includes TrueType fonts such as Verdana, Courier New, Trebuchet MS, Comic Sans and more. The use of these fonts has become pretty standard on many websites, so non-Microsoft OS users (eg Linux) are going to suffer.
Mandrake 8.2 automatically installs the fonts from my Windows partitions, but the Sun machines at work lack the Microsoft fonts and I can really tell the difference on many pages. I have used them on this website, although I do offer alternatives in the stylesheets, eg font-family: Georgia, “New York”, Times, serif.
I’ll have to hunt down some good alternative free fonts that can take on the role of the MS fonts and use them in my stylesheet definitions. I will make a note of my choices on this website.