SUMMARY: Bad Fonts Now Banished (thanks)
Back on 4th.Jan.2004 I lamented the awful looking fonts I saw in some
parts of my KDE 3.1.4 desktop even though I (thought I ) had AA
switched on.
(http://lists.debian.org/debian-kde/2004/debian-kde-200401/msg00011.html)
Following advice from several people here, I did this :
1) Installed XFree86 4.2.1 from www.backports.org, to
replace the XFree86 4.1.0 bundled with Woody; this
turned out to be easy - apt-get dist-upgrade did
everything necessary, without any complication;
apparently AA isn't completely supported by 4.1.0
2) Installed the Microsoft Truetype fonts package
(apt-get install msttcorefonts)
and selected a few of them in KDE Control Centre.
(http://www.glimmer.demon.co.uk/kde/ctlcent-font-spec-tt.png)
3) Disabled the exclusion of AA with a range of point
sizes in Control Centre (for some reason, this had
been the Debian KDE installation default)
AA is now truly activated - a screenshot of my new improved Kate
Tip-Of-The-Day dialog is here:
http://www.glimmer.demon.co.uk/kde/kate-better-font.png
The lousy font screenshot I had complained of is still here:
http://www.glimmer.demon.co.uk/kde/kate-lousy-font.png
As you can see, everything looks a lot better.
Some points:
a) As a side note, it seems that Konsole isn't complete
unless the xfonts-konsole package is installed, so
this should be a dependency of Konsole IMHO.
b) Some people believe that QT for Woody is compiled
without XFT (= AA) support - this does *not* seem
to be the case (I use the downloads.kde.org package
of QT for Debian Woody).
c) AA only works with Truetype fonts (or other scalable
font type), and *not* with bitmap fonts - we should
put this in a FAQ (or the Wiki perhaps); also, there
is no obvious way of telling which fonts are scalable
AFAICT in the Control Centre dialog.
(is "scalable" the same thing as "outline" ?)
Thanks to everyone who helped out.
Nick Boyce
Bristol, UK
--
It is fun to have fun, but you have to know how.
--Cat in the Hat
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