[clue-tech] fonts suck

[Jeff Cann]

Matt Thompson wrote:
> The heavens stretched forth and Jeff Cann decreed the following on or 
> about 9/9/2006 6:49 PM:
>> All,
>>
>> I'm not certain what I did to mess up my fonts under Fedora Core 4.  
>> However, most of them look terrible for even default KDE 3 apps.  In 
>> particular the menu fonts are hard to read.  I removed my .kde 
>> directory to reset defaults and still it looks the same.
>>
>> I then thought perhaps my recently-purchased flat panel was the 
>> issue.  But, I plugged in my work laptop [windows] and it looks clean 
>> and clear.
>>
>> Maybe my card is the issue?  I'm not sure how to troubleshoot from 
>> here.  I appreciate any suggestions.
>
> Well, in my experience the anti-aliasing controls in kcontrol can 
> often be a problem.  I've solved bad fonts in KDE apps before by:
>
> going to kcontrol, deselecting the anti-aliasing, applying and exiting
> go back to kcontrol, select anti-aliasing, apply and exit
This unfortunately did nothing.  But, over the past week or two, I did 
some more digging around.  I ended up doing a series of changes and now 
I'm quite happy with the result.  Here's what I did:

#0 - Fedora does not enable hinting for the true type bytecode 
interpreter [for legal / patent reasons] in the free type library.  I'm 
happy to infringe on software patents at any time, so I was not 
ethically bound to keep this default setting.

The fix for FC is to enable the byte code intepreter in the freetype 
SRPM.  I downloaded the SRPM and in the freetype.spec, I set this from 1 
to 0 [Fedora ships the freetype library with this set to 1].  Other 
distros may already enable it.

    %define without_bytecode_interpreter    1   -->   FC default setting
    %define without_bytecode_interpreter    0   -->   Turn on byte code 
intepreter.

Read more here:  http://freetype.sourceforge.net/patents.html

I thought this would solve my problem.  It didn't as Firefox, Open 
Office [OO], and Thunderbird were not too affected by this setting.  
But, I think this is important for #2 to work correctly.

#1 - I tried changing my local $HOME/.fonts.conf to the following file.  
This actually helped quite a bit for KDE apps, but firefox, Thunderbird 
and OO didn't seem to use local settings.

#2 - To fix firefox, thunderbird, etc. I followed this posting on the 
Ubuntu forums [note - I'm running FC4, but this worked great since this 
the changes are distribution independent].  I did not use the 
msttcorefonts package.
    + http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=208396

I already had my MS Windows TTF fonts installed [for GIMP work - I do a 
lot of gimp work lately].  I downloaded and installed the font config 
XML files into my /etc/fonts.  Note: I renamed my old /etc/fonts to 
/etc/fonts.org

After restarting my X server [logged out and did a 
<CTRL>+<ALT>+<BACKSPACE>] - my desktop finally resembled something 
readable and not jagged.

#3 - I tweaked my LCD monitor settings slightly.  I have only a few 
settings to tweak.  The only ones that changed the look of fonts were 
the 'Focus' and 'Clock'.  The 'Clock' setting really couldn't be changed 
without causing distortion on some part of the screen.  However, I 
decreased the 'Focus' setting by about 50% and this helped perfect the 
screen.

I hope this helps point others to a better looking Linux desktop!  Mine 
looks great!

Jeff

-- 
CLUE President
http://cluedenver.org/