seanlong.orgposted on: January 16, 2014
updated on: February 21, 2014
GitHub likes Helvetica, a lot of sites seem to like the font, too bad it looks like shit on a default PCBSD install. The following will globally replace Helvetica with Arial which looks much nicer.
place the following in ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf, if it doesn't exist create it.
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM 'fonts.dtd'>
<fontconfig>
<match target="pattern">
<test name="family" qual="any">
<string>Helvetica</string>
</test>
<edit binding="strong" mode="prepend" name="family">
<string>Arial</string>
</edit>
</match>
<match target="pattern">
<test name="family" qual="any">
<string>Lucida</string>
</test>
<edit binding="strong" mode="prepend" name="family">
<string>Verdana</string>
</edit>
</match>
</fontconfig>
to test the match type
$ fc-match helvetica
which should return something like
arial.ttf: "Arial" "Normal"
Found how to do this @Arch Linux Forums
Update 2014-02-21 Added a Lucida->Verdana mapping because Lucida is also ugly.
Update 2014-02-15 With PCBSD 10.0 Release I'm getting a deprecation warning when running fc-match helvetica seems ~/.fonts.conf is no longer preferred. I've updated the above instructions with the preferred location ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf.
