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Best Fonts for Linux Browsers? 60

Posted by Cliff from the what's-easier-on-your-eyes dept.
BladeMelbourne asks: "As a web developer with a healthy love of Linux, I was wondering which fonts look great in Linux web browsers (particularly Mozilla/Netscape). Using 'Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif' just doesn't look nice. Do different distro's have different fonts? Which fonts resemble Arial/Helvetica? Which fonts are anti-aliased? Speaking of anti-aliased, does anyone know concisely how to get AA fonts with Mozilla on RedHat 8.0? I have my TTFs working, but don't seem to display correcly and look rather ugly on my display."
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Best Fonts for Linux Browsers? More

Best Fonts for Linux Browsers?

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  • Use georgia ... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by kousik ( 149219 ) <kousik...nandy@@@gmail...com> on Tuesday January 07, 2003 @12:59AM (#5030651) Journal
    ... and courier. After 2 yrs of experiments I found them to make the best combination.
    • Second. I'm using Georgia as my regular font-- serifs beat the pants off of sans-serifs any day, plus I love old style figures-- and Courier as my monospaced font. They look great.

      Then again, I'm also using OmniWeb on OS X, so your mileage may end up sucking because X11's antialiasing looks like chiseled spam.
    • ...as standard.

      They're called Lucidux or Luxi, and they're installed into /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF/luxi*

      Use them. They'll become the standard fonts for Linux web browsers once the rest of the distros get XFree 4.2

  • Please do just one thing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 07, 2003 @01:03AM (#5030666)
    You say you are a web developer, so please pick those fonts out for yourself and just for yourself. Don't pick fonts for me, I like the ones I already have thanks.

  • personal preference (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Satai ( 111172 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2003 @01:15AM (#5030701)
    I always use Konqueror with Bitstream Charter, Bitstream Courier, Adobe Times and Adobe Helvetica.

    In addition, I've found that my eyes are accustomed to having fonts with smaller spaces and no hinting, so with Xft1 I compiled with the xft-quality patch from Keith Packard, and for Xft2 I compile with the spacing part applied and then manually set /etc/fonts/fonts.conf to turn off hinting on the Bitstream fonts.

  • So why's this still an issue? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I may be trolling in this, but I've always wondered why this is an issue at all? Why hasn't someone taken the time to make the UI more User-Friendly?

    Before anyone says: Quit bitching and do it yourself, I can't. I'm an EE. I know about microcode and circuit design. I have a job. It takes up my time. I refuse to work on work at home; Home is for relaxation.

    Oh, and whatever happened to unifying all these various hacks into one standardized way of doing things. How many ways are there to enable anti-aliased fonts? How many ways are there to make the text readable?

    END RANT
    • I may be trolling in this, but I've always wondered why this is an issue at all? Why hasn't someone taken the time to make the UI more User-Friendly?

      They are, but it's a difficult problem and it's taking a lot of time. The situation is significantly better than it was 2 years ago, and hardly recognisable to the mess we had 5 years ago.

    • may be trolling in this, but I've always wondered why this is an issue at all? Why hasn't someone taken the time to make the UI more User-Friendly?

      It has been done. The font tool in the KDE Control Center works great for enabling AA and installing new fonts.

      Oh, and whatever happened to unifying all these various hacks into one standardized way of doing things. How many ways are there to enable anti-aliased fonts? How many ways are there to make the text readable?

      I have no idea how many ways there may be, but unifying them all into one tool is anathema to the OSS developement process. Every single OSS tool has competition, and I think that is vital to the continued health of the community.

  • Disabling Arial (Score:5, Informative)

    by Brian Hatch ( 523490 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2003 @01:40AM (#5030758) Homepage Journal
    In a recent slashdot post (I forget where) there was a reference to a Customizing Mozilla [mozilla.org] page that has a bunch of cool tricks to add to your user.prefs, etc. One of the things they noted was the problem with bad Arial fonts being installed on your machine. Here are the relevant snippets:

    Various Linux distributions have problems with fonts; in particular, Arial, used in many web pages, may map to a font that looks blocky and is smaller than the requested size. A full discussion is in
    bug 46415 [mozilla.org], but an easy solution for Redhat users is this:

    mv /usr/share/fonts/ISO8859-2 /usr/share/fonts.ISO8859-2 and then log out of X and log back in again.

    You can always undo this, if necessary, with the command:

    mv /usr/share/fonts.ISO8859-2 /usr/share/fonts/ISO8859-2

    It's also worth reading this excellent discussion on fuzzy Linux fonts [c2i.net].

    Or, add things like this to user.js in your .mozilla/.... directory:

    // X font banning: see bug 104075.
    // Ban all arial fonts, because abiword installs an ugly one
    // and there doesn't seem to be a good one available:
    user_pref("font.x11.rejectfontpattern", "fname=.*arial.*");

    // Some alternate forms for rejectfontpattern:
    //"fname=.*arial.*;scalable=.*;outline_scaled=.*;\
    // xdisplay=.*;xdpy=.*;ydpy=.*;xdevice=.*");
    // "fname=-zz-abiword.*;scalable=false;outline_scaled =false;");
    // Alternately, reject font if accept pattern does not match it:
    //user_pref("font.x11.acceptfontpattern", ".*");

  • Oddly Enough... (Score:5, Informative)

    by ruineraz ( 515154 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2003 @01:50AM (#5030781) Homepage
    Microsoft Verdana & Tahoma fonts. They common fonts for MS systems, and work under linux if you install the fonts. It's really hard to tell the difference between sites using IE on Windows and Mozilla on Linux with these fonts installed.

    I typically use "Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" or "Tahoma, Arial, Helvetica"
    • There are a few projects to bring Microsoft's Core Fonts to Linux/Unix systems in easy steps: The license for the core fonts Microsoft released permitted them to be redistributed in an unmodified form. These packages basically download and install the fonts for you - but you can do it yourself using wget, ttmkfdir and chkfontpath without much extra work.

    • Verdana (Score:2, Insightful)

      by blwrd ( 455512 )
      Both Verdana and Tahoma are great fonts. Personally I prefer Verdana a bit more as for me it seems to be more readable in small size.
      But then again, when you do your website, it is usually enough to define the font family that you want to be used, rather than the exact font.
      Althought my magick line in css is usually
      font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;
      .. to prefer that verdana bit more over other sans-serif fonts. :)

    • Re:Oddly Enough... (Score:3, Informative)

      by mr3038 ( 121693 )
      I typically use "Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" or "Tahoma, Arial, Helvetica"

      I hope you don't touch the font-size. Or at least specify it as "100%" or "1em". This is important because otherwise correctly configured browsers display the characters too small.

      Way too many websites use styles like p {font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 85%;}. This rule is saying that the author of the page thinks that the page looks best when viewed with font face called "verdana" with a font size of 85% of the size the user has selected she is comfortable with. I'm ok with suggesting a font face but no way normal text should be made smaller than I've set in the preferences. This situation is caused by two reasons:

      • Microsoft decided to not provide an UI to define default font size in the Internet Explorer. Consider this being equivalent to a TV set without an option to adjust volume. Some web "designers" feel that they have to compensate the fact that the MS engineer decided to specify "too large" default font size. (MSIE does have view-text size menu but it has only 5 choices and in addition the feature has many bugs.)
      • Verdana looks better with small font sizes. The problem is, verdana looks bigger than most other fonts so the font-size "has to" be modified to be much smaller for verdana to look good. This results to really small fonts if user's system cannot provide font face called "verdana" or it's different from the one distributed by Microsoft

      The above issues, joined with the fact that MSIE is the most common browser and verdana is distributed alongside MSIE practically guarantee that change to the better isn't going to happen unless majority of web "designers" get a clue. I've already lost faith that majority of the users would have some clue [pivx.com] (MSIE with all the latest patches applied: still 11 security holes with publicly available exploits. Scary, eh?).

      Fortunately, Mozilla does have minimum font-size setting. Unfortunately, some web sites define such a small font sizes that my minimum of 9px is hit with H1 level headers--so all headers look the same and paragraph text is the same size as all the headers.

      • This rule is saying that the author of the page thinks that the page looks best when viewed with font face called "verdana" with a font size of 85% of the size the user has selected she is comfortable with.

        Here's my userContent.css from Mozilla:

        * { font-size: 16px !important; line-height: normal !important; text-decoration: none !important; }
        H1 { font-size: xx-large !important; font-weight: bolder !important; }
        H2 { font-size: x-large !important; font-weight: bolder !important; }
        H3 { font-size: large !important; font-weight: bolder !important; }
        A,A * { text-decoration: underline !important }
        SMALL { font-size: smaller; !important }

        This helps me a lot: the reason I wrote this is that there are web developers who ask questions like this Ask Slashdot.

      • Using font-size: small should not post a significant problem with any browser if implimented properly. It is true that it may provide a smaller font than the user has requested of their browser; however, the browser should render it at a slightly smaller, yet readable size.

        With the default settings of every browser I've tried (Opera5/6-mac, IE4.5/5.1-mac, Galeon/Mozilla-linux, Mozilla-mac, Netscape4-mac), font-size: small provides readable fonts..

        Not that I terribly condone the practice of making the font smaller than the user's preferences.. I personally think that everyone should have their browser properly configured and let designers make their pages accessible; however, if you must make the font smaller.. font-size: small is the safest and most accessible-friendly way to change it.

        YMMV.

        • Using font-size: small should not post a significant problem with any browser if implimented properly.

          Yes, it's fine as long as it isn't used for normal text. Sure, it's still readable, but far from optimal. If you make a page and don't specify font size at all, the font size will be optimal (because I've set up my browser preferences correctly). Why to make things complicated and decrease readability by changing the font size from default? Notice that I'm not saying that one shouldn't use font sizes smaller than default for something like navigation or text based advertisement.

          I repeat my point: it's a mistake to compensate for MSIE's default settings even if you feel that that default is "too large". Some people may feel that its default is optimal (there must be some reason for the decided default size) and changing the font size from it makes the text look too small [or large]. In addition to those MSIE users, anybody with correctly configured browser also sees text too small.

          This issue is often compared to a Joe Sixpack calling local TV station and asking them to turn the volume down because it's too loud. Do you think the local TV station would do that, or do you think they would tell the user to turn down the volume level in his own TV set? You can be pretty sure that the former would happen in reality. But why are web "designers" thinking they should turn the volume own instead?

          • But why are web "designers" thinking they should turn the volume own instead?

            Because these web designers, which are being disparaged in this thread, understand that 99% of their audience:

            Uses some form of IE

            Either don't know or don't care to "dig into" their settings to change their fonts from their defaults

            So, it's web design for the Lowest Common Denominator.

            • ...99% of their audience... Uses some form of IE...don't care. So, it's web design for the Lowest Common Denominator.

              W3C specs are about accessibility, not looks. If IE has bugs that cause some text to be rendered too large to its users then you should tell those users about that. Ff they mind about the issue, they should try some other browser. Or at least fix their user style sheet. For example we have Opera and Phoenix for Windows, Galeon, Mozilla, Phoenix and Konqueror fox unixes and Mozilla, Chimera, MSIE/mac and Safari [apple.com] for MacOS. All of those can properly display text unlike MSIE/win32.

              If you adjust your website text size to look good (in your opinion, some people in fact think bigger text looks better) in MSIE/win32, then less people are going to change to standards compliant browser and we're going to suffer with MSIE/win32 forever. Do you think there would be many users with NN4.x with Javascript and CSS on if authors simply decided to follow the spec only (and causing the NN4.x to crash when float and clear properties were used)? Why do you think we still have that many users using that bad browser?

              It's not like you're going to lose customers if your font size is the default 12px instead of 8px (that you think looks good) but the other way around may be true (the text is so small that visitor cannot read it for a reason or another).

              In addition, you list one reason as "they don't care" which I consider as a reason not to change the font size from default, not a reason to change it. If they really wanted the text size look smaller they would do something for it, don't you think?

              Note that I'm not saying that you should support Mozilla/Opera/Konqueror/Safari and try to make the life of those who use MSIE harder. Instead I suggest that everybody should simply make pages strictly according to the recommendation. If many enough did this, MS didn't had choise but to fix the problems in their browser or lose the market position.

      • Microsoft decided to not provide an UI to define default font size in the Internet Explorer. Consider this being equivalent to a TV set without an option to adjust volume. Some web "designers" feel that they have to compensate the fact that the MS engineer decided to specify "too large" default font size. (MSIE does have view-text size menu but it has only 5 choices and in addition the feature has many bugs.)

        I'm so SICK of hearing people bitch about this. Maybe you morons should use a different browser if your current shitty one doesn't support such rudimentary features. It's not like there's not better (& free) alternatives out there.

        "But I'm at work and we don't have mozilla" download the zip file, extract it to your desktop, and run the executable from there. It works fine.

        • "But I'm at work and we don't have mozilla" download the zip file, extract it to your desktop, and run the executable from there. It works fine.

          What about "But I'm at work and the machine says I don't have enough permissions to run executables from my {NT|UNIX} home directory"? Or "But I'm at school and my home directory's quota isn't big enough to hold a Mozilla installation"? A simple polite e-mail worked to get Mozilla installed (alongside Netscape 4.6) on the Rose-Hulman math department's Solaris OE workstations [rose-hulman.edu], but how would a fellow go about negotiating with the IT department if that fails?

        • I wrote:
          Microsoft decided to not provide an UI to define default font size in the Internet Explorer. Consider this being equivalent to a TV set without an option to adjust volume.
          Some web "designers" feel that they have to compensate the fact that the MS engineer decided to specify "too large" default font size.

          I'm so SICK of hearing people bitch about this. Maybe you morons should use a different browser if your current shitty one doesn't support such rudimentary features.

          Uh? Perhaps you should reread my post? The word "some" doesn't include me. You might be speaking about yourself in 3rd person but I don't do that. I was bitching about the fact that because MSIE is buggy [pivx.com] and it has many users some web "designers" feel that they must break some rules to make a web page to compensate some of those bugs. Nevermind the fact that those "fixes" break any standards-compiliant browser. I don't use MSIE, I don't support it and I always try to code according to the recommended spec [w3.org]--but there're many others doing something else.

  • I could have sworn that RedHat was distributing Mozilla with anti-aliasing support via a GTK+ 1 patch to support Freetype. Certain fonts do not anti-alias and I have found that you may need to set these options manually in Mozilla > Edit > Preferences > Appearance > Fonts > Fonts for: Western and Unicode:
    • Proportional: Serif
    • Serif: Georgia
    • Sans-serif: Arial
    • Cursive: Lucida
    • Fantasy: PostAntiqua
    • Monospace: Courier New
    You installed the Microsoft Fonts Add-On .rpm, right? I'm a Gentoo user, myself ... use the source, Luke!

  • Use the XFT RPM (Score:4, Informative)

    by linuxkrn ( 635044 ) <gwatson@noSPaM.linuxlogin.com> on Tuesday January 07, 2003 @02:00AM (#5030805)
    The easist way to get Mozilla to use rpms that had support for XFT (AA Fonts). for 1.2.1 http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/releases/mozill a1.2.1/Red_Hat_8x_RPMS/xft/ [mozilla.org] Of course, you could always download the source and compile it with --enable-xft. :) As for my own pref, I like Luxi Sans. AA support looks great on mine, and even the menus use the default font. Nice when you are running 1600x1200+!
  • For antialiasing, you're going to have to compile your own mozilla -- Red Hat's packages aren't built with --enable-xft.

    For fonts, I say Verdana and Epsy Sans are the two best proportional on-screen text fonts. Unfortunately, neither can be freely distributed.

  • Best Fonts for Linux Browsers (Score:3, Informative)

    by jsse ( 254124 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2003 @02:14AM (#5030858) Homepage Journal
    Utopia

  • use standard old fonts (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Do not use Arial or Times New Roman, Courier New or Georgia, use just Courier, Helvetica, and Times. Arial etc. are Microsoft fonts that should just go to hell. Even though Apple recommends Arial, Times New Roman, Georgia for the Web, they are nonstandard fonts when it comes to publishing.

  • Mozilla with XFT and GTK theme support (Score:4, Informative)

    by Reality_X ( 23422 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2003 @03:00AM (#5030985) Homepage
    mkdir moz1.3
    cd moz1.3
    lftp ftp.mozilla.org:/pub/mozilla/releases/mozilla1.3a/ Red_Hat_8x_RPMS/xft/RPMS/i386
    mget *
    [close mozilla]
    rpm -Uvh *

    You now have a beautiful browser.
    • Heh, lftp, that's a new one for me, thanks! It looks like we all go with what we know, that is, heres the little Makefile I use:
      ---
      RSYNC_RHOST := archive.progeny.com
      RSYNC_RDIR := mozilla/releases/mozilla1.3a/Red_Hat_8x_RPMS/xft/R PMS/i386/
      RSYNC := rsync -v
      RPM := rpm
      rsync:
      $(RSYNC) -r $(RSYNC_RHOST)::$(RSYNC_RDIR) .
      RPMS := $(wildcard ./*.rpm)
      upgrade:
      $(RPM) -U $(RPMS)
      ---

  • Use MS core fonts with Mozilla-ttf (Score:3, Informative)

    by wotevah ( 620758 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2003 @03:06AM (#5030999) Journal
    This has been on ./ very recently. In addition to downloading the ttf mozilla rpm for RH8.0, you also need to "build" and install the MS core font set for the web from corefonts.sourceforge.net [sourceforge.net].

  • Antialiased Fonts in Mozilla (Score:3, Informative)

    by JimR ( 101182 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2003 @05:49AM (#5031317) Homepage

    I did the following to enable antialiased fonts in Mozilla - I didn't compile my own Mozilla, but I do tend to use recent nightlies:

    // for anti-aliased fonts
    pref("font.FreeType2.enable", true);
    pref("font.freetype2.shared-library", "libfreetype.so.6");
    pref("font.directory.truetype.1", "/home/jim/apps/mozilla-fonts");
    // if libfreetype was built without hinting compiled in
    // it is best to leave hinting off
    pref("font.FreeType2.autohinted", false);
    pref("font.FreeType2.unhinted", false);
    // below a certian pixel size anti-aliased fonts produce poor results
    pref("font.antialias.min", 6);
    pref("font.embedded_bitmaps.max", 1000000);
    pref("font.scale.tt_bitmap.dark_text.min", "64");
    pref("font.scale.tt_bitmap.dark_text.gain", "0.1");

    I had the libfreetype6 Debian package installed.

    I made made my own font directory and copied the *.ttf files that I needed to it, because one of my more esoteric fonts would cause Mozilla to crash.

    In the end I gave up on anti-aliased fonts because they gave me a headache unless I made them much bigger than I'm used to with my normal "crisp" X11 fonts.

    • I have this as my Mozilla-TT settings, and the AA'ed fonts look absolutely great:
      // TrueType
      pref("font.FreeType2.enable", true);
      pref("font.freetype2.shared-library", "libfreetype.so.6");
      // if libfreetype was built without hinting compiled in
      // it is best to leave hinting off
      pref("font.FreeType2.autohinted", true);
      pref("font.FreeType2.unhinted", true);
      // below a certian pixel size anti-aliased fonts produce poor results
      pref("font.antialias.min", 6);
      pref("font.embedded_bitmaps.max", 1000000);
      pref("font.scale.tt_bitmap.dark_text.mi n", 64);
      pref("font.scale.tt_bitmap.dark_text.gain", "0.1");
      // sample prefs for TrueType font dirs
      pref("font.directory.truetype.1", "/usr/share/fonts/truetype/");
      pref("font.directo ry.truetype.2", "/usr/share/fonts/truetype/openoffice");
  • Do not use Arial. Arial is a pig ugly font. It does not look like Helvetica. It is a second rate knock-off.

    Read this [ms-studio.com] and this [ms-studio.com], and don't use Arial again.

    While those pages are loading, how can you say you are a webdesigner, when you haven't learnt that web pages are not wysiwyg? I bet your pages look shit.

    In any case. Don't specify Arial, or at the very least, specifiy it last. Put "san serif" in the list in front. Arial is an abomination, and should be killed. If you want Helvetica, say so, but don't ever imagine that Arial can take the place of Helvetica.
    • > Do not use Arial. Arial is a pig ugly font.

      You might want to talk with Slashdot authors know about your preferences. Didn't you notice the page you were reading was using Arial?

      <FONT FACE="arial,helvetica" SIZE="4" COLOR="#FFFFFF"><B>Best Fonts for Linux Browsers?</B></FONT>
  • I found this article about the author which I scanned in for everyone...

    TEXAS REALLY IS BIGGER

    CRAWFORD, TEXAS - Another case has cropped up in this presidential town that has computer owners complaining about the thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours invested in their new GNU/Linux box, only to have Texas' motto "It's bigger down here" still hold true.

    The computer owner, Peter Slikowski, says that ever since he moved to Texas, things on his computer have seemed blocky and pixelated. Pixelation is the effect where high-contrast items have jagged lines instead of nice smooth lines. Slikoski said he recently moved from a one-bedroom apartment in New York City to his current 12 acre ranch. His move came about with a promotion at his employer who transfered him to Texas.

    "I felt like I was rich with the promotion so I splurged and bought lots of new furniture, a big-screen TV, and a 21-inch monitor for my computer. I didn't have room for any of this in New York."

    Slikowski has taken his concerns to the Better Businness Bureau here in Crawford, but they say that his software manufacturer couldn't possibly be from Texas because no one wears red hats down here.

    We talked with someone at the Bureau and, as luck happened, we talked with the same clerk Slikowski had and we learned many things. The clerk, who is a high school self-proclaimed geek said that while he could not formally assist the individual, he did offer some free computer advice to assist with the jagged text. It seems that Slikowki used to only have room for a fourteen inch monitor in his one bedroom. When he got his new, 21-inch monitor, he never changed the screen resolution. His previous monitor allowed for a 640x480 screen resolution (about 0.3 Megapixels) whereas his new monitor allows for a 2048x1536 screen resolution (about 3.1 Megapixels).

    Using this new resolution would have made each dot on the screen smaller and thereby hiding the jagged lines.

    Slikowki scuffed at the young clerk and refused to listen since he felt the clerk had no industry experience. Slikowski is currently taking the issue up with a trendy electronic newsletter called Slashdot to see if any in their community can address the issue.

    GNU/Linux is a free operating system for computers and is sold exclusively at Wal-Mart under the Lindows name.

    --

    Well, everything seems about right except for that last paragraph. I guess every newspaper article has to get at least one glaring fact wrong.

    P.S. This article is fake. Laugh.


  • They have to setup nice TTFs and AA fonts. This responsibility has been dumped onto the users by the distros who couldnt care what text looks like.

    So web developers shouldnt bend and break to be Linux compatible, Linux has been far more standards based than other OSes, and should too in font display. Web developers already are trying to be flexible to allow IE weirdocities, lets not let Linux do the same to them.

  • The best is (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    VT100 font

  • Verdana,Arial,Helvetica size=-1 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Tom7 ( 102298 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2003 @11:19AM (#5032557) Homepage Journal
    I've been using face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica" size=-1 for a few years, and that seems to work right in the default install of all the computers I use. (My school's sun lab included.) Arial looks really bad in Mozilla on linux.

    Also, do yourself a favor and use CSS. I use this, which also displays text at the right size on Macs (which like to make fonts smaller when browsing the web):

    P { font: 11px Verdana,Arial,Helvetica }

    I can't say much for what the "right way" to do this is without offending those folks who believe the web should not have any markup for design.
    • I've been using face="Verdana,Arial,Helvetica" size=-1 for a few years

      I agree with the earlier poster: Arial should be last after "sans serif"; it is the ugliest font in common usage today. At home I have Opera set to use Gill Sans (anti-aliased under X) for the base font but obviously I don't expect many people to have that setup for reading webpages.

      TWW


  • Folks love to comment how ugly they think GUIs look under X in Netscape/Mozilla, and the same folks often suggest the solution is to use anti-aliased fonts. Sure, anti-aliased fonts are good.

    However, I'd like to share my experience with a very simple alternative method of getting really great looking fonts in X without installing or changing any software.

    • Change your X11 display resolution so pixels are about the same size as the dot pitch of your monitor. For a dot pitch of 0.25mm, the ideal resolution may be 1600x1200.
    The jagged edges of the unaliased X fonts totally disappear. Quasi font anti-aliasing is as good as true anti-aliased fonts but without the hassle! If I had my macro lens handy I'd take a photo of my monitor screen running 1600x1200 and show you the incredibly smooth font outlines I've got with this very ordinary variable width Times Roman 18pt font in Netscape. Using this method I've got perfect results on every CRT display I've tested including cheap Iiyama CRT displays like 19" (USD$150), 17" (USD$120) and 15" (USD$90) monitors. If I reduce X to a resolution much less than 1600x1200 like 1024x768, of course, the jagged edges return.

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