Fedora :: Miss Wine's MS Sans Serif Font Yet?

When Wine went from v1.1.xx to v1.2.xx during the life cycle of Fedora 13, the font MS Sans Serif (sserife.fon, et.al.) went away from the Wine font folder. The situation continues in Fedora 14 with its wine v1.3.xx. The effect of this change was that it busted the fonts in some of my Wine applications. The sans serif font that I was used to seeing in those applications became a small hard-to-read serif font. With trial-and-error experiments in an old version, it was not hard to find out that the font these apps had been using was sserife.fon. Copying the old version's sserife.fon file to the new version's wine font folder restored the font, but it looked terrible. And the usual font smoothing and sub-pixel anti-aliasing stuff weren't enough to make it usable. And copying XP's .ttf fonts to ~/.fonts or the font folder in ~/.wine also did no good. Here is what gave me some relief from the ugly font in the new version.Open the wine registry (wine regedit).

Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESoftwareMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionFontSubstitutes Modify the key "MS Sans Serif" to specify a new substitute font. In my case the substitute font was Liberation Serif (the one I didn't like in my apps). I changed it to Liberation Sans, and I was happy enough again. I also found out today that a wine update resets the registry settings for this particular thing making the font issue return. It takes only seconds to set it back.