Better Fonts for X11?

Shadow_Font asks: "So I've been using XFree since RedHat 4.1 or so (I'm using XFree 3.3.6 on FreeBSD 4.2 nowadays). I've been using Macs since the 128K machine in 1984. The biggest reason I don't use X day in and day out for development is the status of fonts on the platform. They're just horrible! What's being done about this? Does anyone care about this? X fonts have been a sore sight and far worse than what I had on my Mac in 1984, and yet here we are 17 years down the pike. Are there any solutions? Until I can figure out a solution, my main development machine will continue to be a Macintosh with its anti-aliased text which really makes reading code for hours on end easier on the eyes." Give it a few more months folks, and X11 fonts will improve. And if the traditional 75 and 100dpi fonts are too repulsive for you, support for TrueType and Postscript Type 1 fonts has been around for quite a while.

KDE2 gets crappy with GTK themes...

[Locando]

I'm using Mandrake 7.2, and when I've tried KDE2, I've found fonts get very crappy very quickly when you use a "legacy" theme. When I tried to switch KDE over to Aqua to make Konqueror look like my GTK apps, it ignored the fonts I had set and used some hideous scaled version of Helvetica.

Another problem I have with KDE is that its font selector doesn't let you choose things like foundry and the like, making it difficult to pick the right font when you have different versions of one installed. It was a bigger problem with KDE1 (Courier looked horrible...), but I've seen problems with this crop up occasionally.

Mandrake 7.2 does install TTF/KDE by default

[drig]

You've got to check out Mandrake 7.2. It comes with KDE (not sure which version...I'm using Gnome/IceWM), TTF fonts, an early version of X4.0. It's a little behind, so not all the anti-aliasing features are available, but I'm sure they're working on it.

I'm working at a machine that's pretty much a clean install. I'm looking now at TTF fonts in Netscape running on XFree86 4.0.1.

Mandrake and TTF

[drig]

I'm not sure about other distributions, but Mandrake's TTF support was excellent. It installed xfs with True Type Fonts in /usr/share/fonts. Mandrake has the ability to include fonts from a Windows install. Although I'm not using Windows on these machines, Mandrake still installed roughly 50 nice TTF fonts.

I did a search on google for "TTF font gallery" and came up with a bunch of nice sites. A little wget action and I found something like 500 fonts. I bet there's even a way to grab your old familiar fonts off the mac.

With Anti-Aliasing in XFre 4.0, supprt for it in KDE and the GNOME announcement today, fonts will be looking quite nice on Linux!

Andale! Andale! Andale!

[fm6]

Try using Andale Mono for fixed-width apps. It's a lot easier to read than Courier, and character pairs that get confused in other fonts (l-1, l-I, O-0, etc.) are easy to distinguish.

__________________

standard fixup for RH

[Adam Wiggins]

Here's the standard "font fix" I apply to Red Hat.

First, install the 100dpi fonts, included on the CD but not automatically installed.

Next, go into the font server config /etc/X11/fs/config and make all of the lines have ":unscaled" versions first, at the top.

Next, grab Win32 fonts (if you have access to them) and drop them in a directory somewhere. Add this directory to the font server config.

Go to www.gimp.org and go to Resources, then Fonts. Download sharefont and freefont and install them using the type1inst script. Do similar things with the ":unscaled" in the font server config file.

Finally, adjust any apps you're using to have fonts you like. Netscape can usually be fixed pretty easily by turning off the "allow font scaling" boxes in the preferences. If you're using high resolution and 100dpi fonts, you may want to scale up the fonts in some apps, such as your xterm program.

Finally - use KDE2! The KDE team has done a really good job of only using nice fonts in all of their apps. In particular, browsing the web with Konquerer (especially 2.1beta2) looks great. In fact, I've long since forgotten my days of X-font-suckiness, but I remember them sometimes when I make the mistake of loading up Netscape...

Finally, there *is* antialiased font servers available, both for Gnome and KDE. Personally I don't think KDE really needs it, but it certainly is nice looking. Presumably this feature will be rolled into upcoming releases for both of these packages.

Now, my question is this: since it's obviously quite possible to make X fonts not suck, WHY THE HELL DO DISTROS NOT DO THIS BY DEFAULT? It boggles my mind. Isn't this the sort of thing they should be worried about, especially desktop-oriented distros like Mandrake?

Ah well. Hopefully soon enough we'll have a fully anti-aliased kernel 2.4/XFree 4.0/KDE 2.1-based distro with nice fonts preinstalled. It certainly is about time.

Anti-Aliasing

[jfunk]

Ok, I'm replying to my own post but it is quite relevant.

I just checked ftp.suse.com and SuSE has new new X 4.02 packages in /pub/suse/i386/X. The coolest part is that a new Qt is included.

So a bunch of 'rpm -Uvh' commands later, and I'm typing this in anti-aliased fonts under Konqueror.

Not exactly useful for FreeBSD (you could just compile everything) but it would be cool for some people watching this Ask Slashdot with interest.

"bad fonts"

[coyote-san]

Besides TrueType fonts, a couple other things to check are:

1) have you told your X server the resolution of your screen, and loaded the correct font files? One of my pet peeves is that the standard fonts are rendered for 75 and 100 dpi, but I usually run my screen around 120 dpi! If you don't give the server good hints (e.g., using the 75 dpi fonts and default screen resolution) your results will be pretty bad.

2) have you specified ":unscaled" fonts before the standard fonts? "xfnt100" means that the server will attempt to scale any font with a matching name, "xfnt100:unscaled" forces the server to only accept exact matches. This is the problem behind the ugly pixel-replicated fonts. Try listing the standards fonts first with ":unscaled," then the scalable fonts (if any), then the standard fonts without "unscaled." And as before, only list the 100 dpi fonts unless you have a good reason to use 75 dpi.

3) Check your monitor cable, video settings, etc. If your video card is putting out higher frequencies than the monitor can handle, the display will always look horrible. Even if you're within spec, a loose connection or cheap KVM can destroy the signal.

4) Finally, try different fonts. Some fonts are widely used for a "traditional" look, not because they're easy to read on a computer screen. Even a difference in the "foundary" can make a big difference because of the way they handle "serifs" and the like.

Upgrade

[jfunk]

I upgraded to XFree86 4 and the default fonts are pretty nice. I prefer sans serif fonts and I'm using KDE 2 at 1280x1024.

The fun part is that SuSE included a happy script called 'getmsttfonts' with their XFree4 packages that grabs all of Microsoft's free fonts from ftp.microsoft.com, uncompresses them, and installs them. Ready for immediate use.

I don't find them any better. I have them there, but I'm still using the default helvetica, 100dpi for pretty much everything.

So, the first step is probably going to be upgrading to XFree86 4.