Quick tip: Truetype font setup - let KDE do the work

b3 · Last edited by b3 on Sun Jun 08, 2003 10:25 am; edited 1 time in total

Dunno if I just missed a step in my font config, but after setting up my Truetype fonts with fontconfig, they looked horrible in both GTK and KDE apps - more specifically, the spacing of the fonts was all off. Tried pretty much everything, but nothing helped (most "tweaks" made the fonts look worse, actually =( )

But - I found something that does work. Letting KDE do the "dirty work" for you. Admittedly, this only helps if you have KDE installed - if you don't it's an 8+ hour emerge, so it's not something to be installed lightly.

Assuming you do have KDE installed, though... Open up the Control Center, go to System Administration -> Font Installer. Point it at your Truetype directory. It'll copy all the fonts into ~/.kde3.1/share/fonts/TrueType, and set them up. Unfortunately, the global fontconfig seems to take precedence, so you won't see the improvement right away.

Once it's done, though, drop out of X, and rename the *existing* fontconfig Truetype directory (mine was /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TrueType) to something else (backup is always important, in case this doesn't work for you), and copy your ~/.kde3.1/share/fonts/TrueType directory over to where fontconfig's was.

Restart X, and see if that looks better -- it helped mine tremendously. Fonts actually seem to have the correct spacing.

Should be possible to see what steps KDE takes and replicate them outside of KDE, but I'm not entirely certain of how to go about doing that.

dsd · Posted: Sun Jun 08, 2003 9:40 am Post subject: Thanks

Great.
I too was a bit bothered by the fonts not being quite right.
This fixed it.

Edit: Nope, not quite perfect. I'm still getting font problems in mozilla.

c_kuzmanic · Posted: Thu Jun 12, 2003 6:47 pm Post subject:

Great Post! This problem was bothering me for months, after consulting many posts&howtos on proper font-setup this finally fixed the problem :wink:

snakattak3 · Guru Joined: 11 Dec 2002 Posts: 468 Location: Seattle

There are some very nice fonts in /usr/portage/media-fonts/ .
I Just let portage do the work for me and haven't had a problem since. I am using kde too btw.

triad · Posted: Mon Oct 13, 2003 10:32 am Post subject:

THANK YOU!
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