How to disable font Arial in Opera?

Question

After upgrade to Opera 10.60 on my Gentoo Linux it stopped reading fonts.conf all of a sudden and now I am not happy with how Arial bold looks in non-Latin letters. Particularly bold cyrillic "м" letter looks almost as black square when Arial is used. I want to tell opera not to use Arial at all, there are plenty of replacements: Liberation fonts, Droid, etc. I found stylesheets, but not sure how to write statement which prescribes not to use Arial in web pages. I know that there is "not" selector in CSS v3, but could not make a valid statement out of it. Anyone mastered negative statements in CSS?

Answer 1

I think you should be able to use Opera's config options:

opera:config#UserPrefs|LocalCSSFile

to define a style rule. While my approach isn't a negative statement it should achieve the same result:

@font-face {
font-family: "Arial";
src: url(path/to/replacement/font.ttf); /* or local(path/to/replacement/font.ttf); */
}

I'm not sure if there's a way to force Opera to use your user.css file for Arial fonts, or not, but it might work. And it's the best I could think of at the time...good luck! =)

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Edited following comments:

This seems reasonable but it did not work. May be it has to be used with some element definitions. - temujin.ya.ru

and the response, from ChrisW:

@temujin.ya.ru See whether it works when used with a stylesheet that specifies Arial explicitly. If so then the problem is with stylesheets that specify Arial implicitly, e.g. by specifying "sans-serif". Also I wonder whether there are other/similar font names e.g. "Arial Cyr", "Arial Cyrillic", etc. – ChrisW

If the problem is related to implied fonts (font-family: sans-serif; for example) then the above could be added to, with the following:

@font-face {
font-family: "sans-serif";
src: url(path/to/replacement/font.ttf); /* or local(path/to/replacement/font.ttf); */
}

But this approach would become unwieldy very, very quickly.

An alternative, and possibly better, approach is:

[in Opera] Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Content > Style Options > Presentation Modes

And configure the options available there, which allows you to specify whether pages render under 'author' (author of the web-site) or 'user' (your own) css modes. You can limit this to 'page fonts and colours,' or 'My fonts and colours.'

Though I'm not sure how good, or bad, this alternative might be.

Answer 2

Just symlink Arial to Liberation Sans in your filesystem.