http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10952
Summary: Wine prefers Marlett instead of a legible font Product: Wine Version: 0.9.52. Platform: PC URL: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=458234 OS/Version: Linux Status: UNCONFIRMED Severity: normal Priority: P2 Component: wine-gui AssignedTo: wine-bugs@winehq.org ReportedBy: ovek@arcticnet.no
Currently, Debian discourages installing non-free stuff such as the Microsoft core fonts. Debian policy forbids me from recommending it. (They also consider the Liberation fonts undistributable.) Hence, you have to expect Wine users from Debian to not have fonts like Arial available. The problem is that, if an application asks for such a nonexistent fonts (very common), Wine frequently chooses Marlett, which is fairly illegible. It'd be much more user-friendly if it chose Tahoma or something.
I have a bug report that suggests that whether Wine chooses Marlett or not depends on the fontforge version that Marlett.ttf is generated with (the fontforge in Debian Stable (etch) works, but the one in Debian Testing/Unstable does not), but I don't have much time to investigate why. Perhaps someone at Wine knows. Is it something that should be fixed in the marlett.sfd file, or should the bug be reassigned to fontforge?