SOLVED (and new question) - Re: Fonts aren't quite right (different problem)

[dman <dsh8290@rit.edu>]

(Cc'd back to the list)

On Sun, Oct 21, 2001 at 11:53:33AM -0700, Jim McCloskey wrote:
| 
| on Sat, Oct 20, 2001 at 11:26:44PM -0400, dman (dsh8290@rit.edu) wrote:
| 
| > Ok, I know you're all tired of hearing about X font problems, but this
| > problem is a bit different and wasn't solved by any of the recently
| > posted solutions.
| > 
| > Ok, I have a woody box (that got sid by accident several weeks ago).
| > I tried reordering the FontPath lines in the X config file.  Then I
| > got some messed up fonts in X and the warning that the Type1 and
| > Speedo directories weren't valid FontPaths.  The visual problem is
| > that in gnome-terminal, gvim, and x-chat the font is way too big now.
| 
| I had what at least sounds like the same problem after an X
| upgrade---huge ugly fonts all over the place. It drove me up the
| walls. I tried all sorts of increasingly desperate strategems, but the
| resolution turned out to be embarrassingly straightforward. At some
| point XF86Config-4 was overwritten in such a way that the font-path
| for the 100dpi fonts was ordered before the font-path for the 75dpi
| fonts in the `Files' section. I'm not sure how or when this happened
| but when I reversed the order, all returned to normal.

Yes, this is exactly it!  The latest dexconf-generated config had the
100dpi before the 75dpi fonts.  I switched them (both the :unscaled
and the other pair) and now everything is back (well, once I put the
settings back in gvim and gnome-terminal.

| You say that you tried reordering the font-path lines, but it wasn't
| clear to me what changes exactly you made, so I thought it might be
| worth passing on my own experience.

Thanks!

| The only consolation for me was that before I hit on the stupidly
| obvious right answer, I had learned a lot about font-management under
| X. Sigh,

So, did you learn why the lower res fonts look better?  It seems
counter-intuitive to me.

-D