I’ve just spent an hour tweaking SmartyPants.py, trying to work out why it didn’t seem to be changing some of the straight quotes into proper ones, only to discover that it did—except Liberation Sans, Dead Rat’s new free font, doesn’t do fancy punctuation. Unfortunately, Liberation is the first free font I’ve found that looks halfway decent (apart from Terminus, but that’s monospace only…).

I might use Arial, even though it’s not free (merely freely redistributable), but that apparently doesn’t do what I want either. FreeSans is nice, but the lowercase “e” is iffy, so it looks ugly.

After a bit of fiddling, I’ve come to the conclusion that Helvetica is actually quite a nice font, but X.org ships with a crappy bitmap version so I have a choice between eye-bleedingly small or unreadably ugly. Wonder where I can dig up a TrueType version from…