I was sitting hunched and spindly at my computer tonight pondering font clash, tracking and kerning, when something suddenly occurred to me… I am seriously deranged when it comes to fonts.
Simply put, I spend entirely too much time thinking about fonts. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve changed the title font on this site, and the body font. About the only thing I’ve been happy with is the beautiful but strong, perfectly smooth and solid curves of the Verdana Bold font that is used in my banner. Now there’s a font for you. You can take all those fancy serifs and stick them right where the sun don’t shine.
What was really just bugging the heck out of me tonight was the fancy stylized cursive lowercase g of Microsoft’s Trebuchet font. Don’t get me wrong, this g looks just fine, but it just doesn’t belong on the same page as the heroically bold and stoic Verdana Bold. I’ve tried my damndest to find a good replacement font…
My titles are auto generated by PHP, and the problem is PHP’s inability to properly handle tracking and kerning with most fonts. For those who don’t know, kerning is the process of adjusting letter spacing between individual letters. For example, an A and a V can be snuggled up close together because of the shape of the letters. If the spacing between the letters is screwy and irregular things can end up looking truly aweful. This is the problem with PHP and it’s font graphics functions. They regularly fuck the kerning up bad, and so you just have no choice but to use one of the few fonts that it doesn’t make a complete disaster out of.
Well… I think I’ve made my original point by now, quite by accident. 
If your as font obsessed as me, here are some great freeware tools to view the fonts installed on your system.
FontLister and FontSelector
FontList
Microsoft actually has some pretty good resources on it’s typography site too, including an index of font foundries, and a list of default fonts installed with various MS products.
Other sites worth dropping by:
wikipedia
kerning
goodfonts
simplythebest