fonts with gnome 2.2 & xfree 4.2.99

iamarug · Apprentice Joined: 09 Feb 2003 Posts: 220

In my quest to get a good looking desktop so I can move more towards linux, I emerged gnome. Everything seems to be working ok and the speed is good but the fonts are ugly. In mozilla, antialiasing seems to work, but the fonts are really bad looking since they don't seem to have even heights nor spacing. In gnome, the antialiasing seems to have been more or less disabled after I tried using some of the techniques described on this forum.

I searched through all the fonts posts several times but there just doesn't seem to be an updated guide on how to setup fonts to look good in linux. Mostly, the information is about how to fix a problem a person might be having after and upgrade or some other thing.

Basically, I am looking for a guide to correct the fonts on a freshly installed system. I would really appreciate any help.

PS: I would post some screenshots except I dont know how to take screen captues and save them to a file. Any tips?

H-Pi · Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2003 6:59 pm Post subject:

gnome has a tool for it, in the "actions" menu, and then "screenshot", sim-pel, as we say here

your font problem might be fontconifg or xft or something, watch the font properties of gnome (desktop prefs > font), there you can choose font rendering options, and in "details" you can set more, like the number of dpi

ahbritto · n00b Joined: 02 Feb 2003 Posts: 33

After everything was looking good for me, Gnome 2 applications were anti-aliased and Mozilla/Galeon web pages were anti-aliased, I found Mozilla/Galeon displaying some fonts really poorly.

I diagnosed that I had a problem with bitmap fonts being available by using using the Font control panel: Applications > Desktop Preferences > Font > Application font. Some of the choices, like Helvetica, looked awful. Turns out, Helvetica is only available as a bitmap font.

My fix is to disable access to bitmap fonts for fontconfig:

One of the default directories for fonts in /etc/fonts/fonts.conf is:
<dir>/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts</dir>

This ends up including nasty bitmap fonts.

Change the line to:
<dir>/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/truetype</dir>
<dir>/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF</dir>
<dir>/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1</dir>

Restart applications to see that Helvetica is no longer available. Applications should choose a nice alternative such as Arial.

Finally, with subpixel smoothing, I found that enabling the FreeType option USE="smooth", which is off default, produced characters that were smooshed together. So, if you've enabled it, get rid of it and re-emerge freetype.

iamarug · Apprentice Joined: 09 Feb 2003 Posts: 220

ok, here is a screenshot of what my fonts look like. As you can see the fonts look really bad. If you look at shot two, you see that as I am typing here, the fonts are quite bad.
Any suggestions?
http://63.123.147.93/shot1.png
http://63.123.147.93/shot2.png

ebrostig · Posted: Thu Feb 13, 2003 1:27 am Post subject:

Maybe Font problems in XFree 4.2.1 will help you solve the issue?

Erik
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iamarug · Apprentice Joined: 09 Feb 2003 Posts: 220

I went through the thread mentioned by ebrostig and will be trying some things. I will post some more screenshots in a little while.
basically the only things that I could find that applied to me were making sure that my font paths were correct, the dpi count was symetric (it is 90x90) and fc-cache.
However, it seems that there is no simple step by step quide to get things working from scratch. I guess patience might be the only option. On another note, some things look alot better in fluxbox! (but I dont know how to do screen caps here)
any other suggestions would be welcome.

iamarug · Apprentice Joined: 09 Feb 2003 Posts: 220

seems stuff is looking better but still some problems. If you look at the last screenshot, at the very very bottom of the slashdot page, the fonts don't look too good.
Still searching for solutions to make the fonts look on par with windows.
http://63.123.147.93/shot3.png
http://63.123.147.93/shot4.png

JohnY · Guru Joined: 26 Jul 2002 Posts: 305

From looking at your screenshots I would suggest that you try turning off the bytecode interpreter in freetype and setting 'smooth' in your USE flags.

JohnY

iamarug · Apprentice Joined: 09 Feb 2003 Posts: 220

thanks for the tip JohnY.
How do I turn of the bytecode interpreter? When I add smooth to my use variable, which packages would I have to recompile?

Thanks again.

JohnY · Guru Joined: 26 Jul 2002 Posts: 305

See this thread:

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=20833&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=75

I believe you only need to recompile freetype, but I could be wrong.
freetype, pango (if gnome), xft2, and fontconfig are all interrelated, and sometimes if I've recompiled freetype, I recompile xft2, and fontconfig. But my fonts on the desktop and in mozilla have been looking very good (on par or better than win32), so even after upgrading to XFree 4.2.99 I haven't needed to recompile them.

JohnY

iamarug · Apprentice Joined: 09 Feb 2003 Posts: 220

It seems that thread mentions that the latter versions of freetype have the bytecode interpreter off by default and have the autohinter instead. I guess that crosses out that option.