Re: Will my fonts every look good?

[Bill Moseley <moseley@hank.org>]

On Sat, 4 Jan 2003, Jamin W. Collins wrote:

> It might just be me, but I don't really see any problem with the fonts
> in your screen shots with the exception of Abiword (fonts4.png).  That I
> believe is problem of Abiword (I could be wrong).
> 
> Otherwise it appears that your chief complaint may simply be that the
> fonts displayed are not the ones you want?

Well, those might be the same thing.  Yes, some fonts are fine.  

For example, http://hank.org/images/fonts.png the side-bar menu fonts look
worse on mozilla (the one on the left), although I'm using my laptop now
and the look better in that image than on my CRT (Sony 21") on my desktop.
Is mozilla using anti-aliased fonts there?

The other problem with that image is the drop-down form in Opera.  Notice
the "United States" in mozilla with the fonts on Opera.  Much bigger in
Opera.  IIRC I think adding the truetype fonts caused that.

The next image http://hank.org/images/fonts2.png is showing the results of
using XftConfig to enable AA fonts -- the difference is seen in Opera.  I
guess AA fonts are a personal thing, as they look fuzzy to me.

http://hank.org/images/fonts3.png does look better on my laptop than on my
CRT.  The google results in mozilla the characters are of different
thicknesses -- or even different parts of a single character vary in line
thickness.  On my CRT it kind of looks like random characters are bold.

Also in the image you can see xfontsel using the comic sans ms font.  Why
in the world is it doing that?  I have not specified any fonts in
.Xdefaults or any other place that I can think of.

So yes, it's proably a matter of the wrong fonts.

I don't understand how applications like Opera and Mozilla select fonts.
What is Opera doing to get that big thick font for the form elements?  It
would be nice to be able to monitor what fonts the applcication is
requesting and what fonts the X server is supplying.

In the form field case I suspect that Mozilla and Opera are selecting
similar fonts, but different enough that the X server is supplying
very different fonts. 

Thanks very much for the help.

-- 
Bill Moseley moseley@hank.org