I really hate Trebuchet. I really want to like it. After all, it's a humanist font, and those are my favorites. But the lowercase g and the ampersand just grate on me and the lowercase i and j with their crossbars feel cumbersome. I took it upon myself last year to tweak this font to try to salvage it. But here it is a year later, and I'm still not happy.When posting in the Typophile forum on my Trebuchet project last year, I mentioned that the lowercase g was inspired by the on in Meta. One snarky commenter suggested I simply substitute all of the Meta characters into Trebuchet. So that’s what I did.
Well, not really. What I did was I took my copy of the Meta font and changed the Family Name parameter to Trebuchet MS. Then I deleted the Trebuchet font files from my system and copied in my new font files. The result was simply fantastic. I loved the result.
So of course I didn't stop there. Arial is boring. I replaced it with Myriad. Gentium is the serifed font that replaced Times New Roman. And Consolas is my new monospaced font, replacing Courier New. I even replaced the universally-hated Comic Sans with Mighty Zeo, one of the fantastic options offered by Blambot.
When I tried to do the same on my Windows computer, however, it didn't work out so well. The fonts looked awful. Microsoft ClearType is great for optimized fonts, but for other ones, their font renderer is simply awful. I ended up using all ClearType fonts as my replacements (Arial→Calibri, Trebuchet→Corbel, Courier New→Consolas, Times New Roman→Constantia).
Most of the fonts I chose to use have commercial licenses. (I tried to use Delicious as my sans serif font, but I just didn't like it as well as Meta or Myriad.) However, Gentium license does permit redistribution, so here are the modified font files. Just delete all the Times New Roman files out of your system's Fonts folder and copy these in. Enjoy!
Download the Gentium font family to replace Times New Roman
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