Helvetica won't get anti-aliased

Charles Alexander · n00b Joined: 07 Nov 2005 Posts: 55

Is there a way to replace all instances of Helvetica with Arial? For some reason Helvetica is never anti-aliased on this system.

Vann · Guru Joined: 04 Aug 2002 Posts: 357

Although you can do some trickery with fontconfig to convince it that Helevetica is actually Arial, a better way is to set it through whatever desktop environment. If you're not using a desktop environment then you'll have to set for each subset of software you use, e.g., for your GTK+ applications, for your QT application, and so forth.

Charles Alexander · n00b Joined: 07 Nov 2005 Posts: 55

Is there anyway to just get an antialiased helvetica?

dek · l33t Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 657 Location: Germany

Have you ever found a solution for this?

yngwin · Posted: Wed Jun 07, 2006 12:12 pm Post subject:

Helvetica on most X systems is a bitmap font. If you don't want to use that (like me) set the -bitmap-fonts useflag. And do

dek · l33t Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 657 Location: Germany

Thanks for your quick reply, i will give it a try.
Are there any known side effects, like apps that rely on bitmap-fonts for printing or something?

dek · l33t Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 657 Location: Germany

That did the trick. Finally all these unreadable fonts are gone when browsing with Konqueror. Thanks again!

widremann · Veteran Joined: 14 Mar 2005 Posts: 1314

dek · l33t Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 657 Location: Germany

Well, if it was that easy i wouldn't have asked.

Sites with font-family Helvetica as first font will use the bitmap-font regardless of the settings.

skellr · Posted: Wed Jun 07, 2006 2:04 pm Post subject:

That font put me over the edge once or twice.

Try this in your .fonts.conf

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>

dek · l33t Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 657 Location: Germany

After the upgrade to Xorg 7.0 these ugly bitmap-fonts came back.

Any ideas what happened to the USE flag or how to get rid of the fonts again?

dek · l33t Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 657 Location: Germany

*bump*

Rainskellr: your solution doesn't work for me. I have the feeling something is missing/wrong in your example. There's a closing match tag, but no opening. Removing it doesn't help.

PaulBredbury · Watchman Joined: 14 Jul 2005 Posts: 7310

You want something like:

a.forlorn · Guru Joined: 12 Aug 2005 Posts: 412 Location: Ulm, Germany

According to the log of fotcache, changes have to be applied to /etc/fonts/local.conf. But alas it still doesnt make it work for me.
_________________
Gentoo update is sometimes harder than it should.

dek · l33t Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 657 Location: Germany

Same here. :/

What packages are the bitmap fonts in? Not installing them at all with Xorg-6.8 was perfect for me.

skellr · Posted: Wed Jul 12, 2006 8:54 pm Post subject:

gkmac · Posted: Wed Jul 12, 2006 9:25 pm Post subject:

It seems that qt-3.3 stubbornly refuses to respect any fonts.conf substitutions unless Helvetica is actually missing. Bug report.

For those wishing to get rid of Helvetica in the same way as the now-vanished "bitmap-fonts" USE flag did, unmerge font-adobe-100dpi and font-adobe-75dpi. To prevent portage from pulling them back in with the next xorg update, create the file /etc/portage/profile/package.provided with these lines...

dek · l33t Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 657 Location: Germany

Thanks gkmac!
Just a small remark: it's /etc/portage/package.provided, not /etc/portage/profile/package.provided.

PaulBredbury · Watchman Joined: 14 Jul 2005 Posts: 7310

dek, see doc re location of package.provided - it's in the "profile" subdir :wink:

dek · l33t Joined: 16 May 2002 Posts: 657 Location: Germany

Oops

Peach · Posted: Tue Dec 06, 2011 11:41 pm Post subject:

really old post, but worth an update:

HumanUser · n00b Joined: 25 Oct 2013 Posts: 2

HumanUser · n00b Joined: 25 Oct 2013 Posts: 2

noisebleed · Posted: Sat Feb 08, 2014 4:31 pm Post subject:

linuxfiend · n00b Joined: 20 Jun 2009 Posts: 2 Location: Caney, KS