On Fri, 7 Jun 2002, Xpert wrote:
>Date: Fri, 7 Jun 2002 18:41:06 +1000
>From: Xpert <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>To: Xpert mailing list <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Content-Type: text/plain;
> charset="us-ascii"
>List-Id: General X Discussion
>Subject: Appearance in X...
>
>Can anyone shed any light on why KDE looks so bad compared to Windows? The KDE
>fonts are really rough and difficult to read, particularly when they are
>small. I don't know that it is just just the lack of True Type fonts
>(although this is probably a contributing factor) as I have installed a whole
>bunch of Windows TTFs and it has made little difference.
>
>I have tried using True Type fonts and have checked the
>"Anti-Aliasing for Fonts" box in the KDE Control Centre, but they are still
>quite fuzzy compared to those in Windows.
>
>I am trying to get Red Hat 7.3 installed at my work to replace our network of
>aging Win95 PCs, but I just _know_ that as soon as the staff see the terrible
>fonts that they will reject it out of hand.
>
>I am evaluating Galeon, OpenOffice 1.0 and Evolution as that is all most of
>our office will need, but the appearance compared to IE, MS Office and
>Outlook is terrible.
>
>Can anyone offer any information/advice/website that will help me to get them
>a Windows-quality display?
Make absolutely sure that you do not have any scaled bitmap fonts
in your fontpath. By default, if you list a directory containing
bitmap fonts in your font path, they will be made available both
scaled and unscaled. Scaled bitmap fonts look atrocious.
ie:
Bad: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi
Good: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi:unscaled
Note that this only pertains to the core X fonts served by xfs or
the X server itself. Check your xfs config /etc/X11/fs/config
and ensure that all bitmap font directories contain the :unscaled
suffix.
A large majority of ugly font issues are due to this problem.
Future versions of XFree86 will come with bitmap fonts defaulting
to unscaled only, and require usage of the new :scaled attribute
on font path elements to select the ugly scaled bitmap fonts
(for compatibility with any broken apps requiring them).
Another possibility is that you just do not have decent fonts
installed. Out of the box, there are not a lot of Truetype fonts
installed on the system. This is due to there simply being a
distinct lack of freely available and redistributeable truetype
fonts. As such, a default install, will give you the default few
truetype and type1 fonts. You will need to install Microsoft
webfonts and/or other truetype fonts from Windows or other
software which you have legal license of, or download other fonts
off the web. There are tonnes of free fonts out there. We would
include many of them if the licencing terms allowed us to do so,
however they do not.
If the problem you're describing is determined to be due to
something else, we'll need a lot more information, screenshots,
etc. to be able to hazard a guess as to what is going wrong.
Linux/XFree86/KDE/GNOME is certainly becoming a very good
desktop, however it does still require a bit of tweaking ala
fonts et al. before it looks reasonably like our Windows
counterpart.
If you're looking to avoid the Microsoft tax, and you're willing
to tweak a bit (for the time being), the benefits of using Linux
are well worth it IMHO. Also, there is much work being done in
the area of fonts within the XFree86 community, in particular
Keith Packard's Xft2 and fontconfig. I believe within 8-12
months, most of the font related headaches that are frequently
problems to XFree86 users, will have become a thing of the past.
Hope this helps.
--
Mike A. Harris Shipping/mailing address:
OS Systems Engineer 190 Pittsburgh Ave., Sault Ste. Marie,
XFree86 maintainer Ontario, Canada, P6C 5B3
Red Hat Inc.
http://www.redhat.com ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
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