Crappy fonts in Firefox [solved]

[MattSharp]

A lot of the text in firefox looks crappy.

Here is a screenshot example: http://mattsharp.pazoles.com/badfont.jpg

Has anyone seen this problem before or know what is wrong?

[syscrash]

Do you have the corefonts installed? Are you using XFS?

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# ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge corefonts

And make sure that your fontpaths are set up (to include the location of the newly installed corefonts). The fontpaths should be set in

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/etc/X11/XF86Config

and also in

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/etc/fonts/fonts.conf

Also run

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# ttmkfdir

In the directory that the corefonts install to (i'm not exactly sure, heh).
Good luck!

[argasek]

I have posted some kind of solution (but I don't know if You've got the same problem as me) in this thread. It's in Polish, but You should get the idea

[aethyr]

Do you have the corefonts installed? Are you using XFS?

Ugh, you don't need corefonts, nor XFS. I don't know why people keep recommending XFS. It hasn't been needed for a long time (over two years) to get good fonts. You really don't need corefonts either if you have the truetype USE flag set. If you look at the ebuild (for xfree 4.3 at least), you'll see it does the following:

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### SAMPLE FROM EBUILD:
        if use truetype && use !bindist
        then
                einfo "Unpacking MS Core Fonts..."
                mkdir -p ${WORKDIR}/truetype; cd ${WORKDIR}/truetype
                for x in ${MS_COREFONTS}
                do
                        if [ -f ${DISTDIR}/${x} ]
                        then
                                einfo "  ${x/\.\/}..."
                                cabextract --lowercase ${DISTDIR}/${x} > /dev/null || die
                        fi
                done
                ebegin "Done unpacking Core Fonts"; eend 0
        fi

[MattSharp]

XFS was already installed. Just forgot to put the truetype directory in my fonts.conf.

Thansk though....

[syscrash]

Do you have the corefonts installed? Are you using XFS?

Ugh, you don't need corefonts, nor XFS. I don't know why people keep recommending XFS. It hasn't been needed for a long time (over two years) to get good fonts. You really don't need corefonts either if you have the truetype USE flag set. If you look at the ebuild (for xfree 4.3 at least), you'll see it does the following:

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### SAMPLE FROM EBUILD:
        if use truetype && use !bindist
        then
                einfo "Unpacking MS Core Fonts..."
                mkdir -p ${WORKDIR}/truetype; cd ${WORKDIR}/truetype
                for x in ${MS_COREFONTS}
                do
                        if [ -f ${DISTDIR}/${x} ]
                        then
                                einfo "  ${x/\.\/}..."
                                cabextract --lowercase ${DISTDIR}/${x} > /dev/null || die
                        fi
                done
                ebegin "Done unpacking Core Fonts"; eend 0
        fi

I never recommended XFS, I was asking if he was using it...

[aethyr]

I never recommended XFS, I was asking if he was using it... :roll:

Sorry :( It's just annoying to see XFS still being recommended (in other places, not necessarily by you) two years after it's no longer needed. Of course XFS does still serve a purpose (surving fonts to remote machines), but on local machines, 9 times out of 10 it is unnecessary.

[searcher]

Sorry It's just annoying to see XFS still being recommended (in other places, not necessarily by you) two years after it's no longer needed.

Not to take this thread too far from the road (off-topic) but why wouldn't i want to use xfs? I always found the standard way of putting fonts in the xorg.conf (XFree86config) to look ugly and not anti-aliased. This influenced my decision to use xfs instead of just a FontPath entry.

~searcher

[aethyr]

I always found the standard way of putting fonts in the xorg.conf (XFree86config) to look ugly and not anti-aliased. This influenced my decision to use xfs instead of just a FontPath entry.

That definately used to be true. Originally anti-aliasing was only supported through XFS. But since XFree 4.something you can get good fonts without it.

[dedeaux]

can someone point to some definative information and guide(s) to get good looking fonts then. I have a gentoo system and notice that xfs is indeed serving up my fonts. I would love to try something different. Firefox does have poor fonts.

Mentioned in this thread was to put truetype in your use statement. So, what then needs to be recompiled to get this working without xfs?

thanks...

[aethyr]

Mentioned in this thread was to put truetype in your use statement. So, what then needs to be recompiled to get this working without xfs?

Truetype might be in your USE flags already (emerge -pv xfree). Anyways, if you post your XF86Config file down to EndSection below Section "Module" I can show you what you need to change.

[dedeaux]

Truetype might be in your USE flags already (emerge -pv xfree). Anyways, if you post your XF86Config file down to EndSection below Section "Module" I can show you what you need to change.

Ok... Thanks...

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emerge -pv xorg-x11

These are the packages that I would merge, in order:

Calculating dependencies ...done!
[blocks B     ] x11-base/xfree (from pkg x11-base/xorg-x11-6.7.0)
[ebuild   R   ] x11-base/xorg-x11-6.7.0  -3dfx -3dnow -cjk -debug -doc -hardened -ipv6 -mmx +nls +pam -pie -sdk -sse -static  71,900 kB

Then from the /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

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Section "ServerLayout"
        Identifier     "XFree86 Configured"
        Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
        InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
        InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

Section "Files"
        RgbPath      "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb"
        ModulePath   "/usr/X11R6/lib/modules"
        FontPath     "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/"
        FontPath     "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Speedo/"
        FontPath     "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/"
        FontPath     "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/CID/"
        FontPath     "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/"
        FontPath     "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/"
EndSection

Section "Module"
        Load  "ddc"
#       Load  "pex5"
#       Load  "xie"
        Load  "bitmap"
        Load  "vbe"
        Load  "int10"
        Load  "glx"
        Load  "record"
        Load  "extmod"
        Load  "dbe"
#       Load  "dri"
        Load  "xtrap"
        Load  "type1"
        Load  "speedo"
        Load  "freetype"
        Load  "synaptics"
EndSection

As a side note... in the past I have attempted to rip ttf collections from windows or cool fonts from live cd distros, but have always failed to get them to work. I usually created a directory, say, /usr/share/fonts/ttf and then add that to the xorg.conf, but never had them available.

[aethyr]

Hm, it doesn't look like you're running xfs at all to me, because I think you need to have something like

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FontPath "unix/:-1"

if that was the case. I also noticed that the xorg ebuild changed how fonts are handled (i.e. no more truetype useflag). I don't know how much I can help you since I don't use xorg, I know they changed around their directory structure. As far as I can tell though, you're not using xfs.

I do know if you're not using xfs, it will default to the order of fonts:

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Section "Files"
        RgbPath      "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb"
        ModulePath   "/usr/X11R6/lib/modules"
        FontPath     "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/truetype"
        FontPath     "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1"
        FontPath     "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi"
        FontPath     "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi"
        FontPath     "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc"
        FontPath     "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/CID"
        FontPath     "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Speedo"
EndSection

So in this case, programs will use truetype fonts first if they're available.

[dedeaux]

cool

Then I guess I will work at getting the font I want working under gnome. I noticed I had xfs running on boot, so I removed it with rc-update.

[syscrash]

I think that the only thing that XFS would be useful for on single systems (not sharing fonts) would be the management of X server config files (makes it easier than having to add your fontpaths everytime you make a new config).