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Re: these fonts are making me go crazy

Bill Moseley wrote:

Why the #$%* can't the font installation and setup be a bit easier?



I would not have put it so nicely! ;)

I finally got my fonts looking better on one of my machines that's been
driving me NUTS for about a year (debian-user is littered with my
pleas for help with fonts).

This does *NOT* mean I have it setup correctly or that I understand
things much better now...


Certainly the case for me, like...
I reinstalled Debian Sarge from scratch (boot floppies) keeping careful notes on problems, behavior and it goes like this:
1. install mozilla source tarball with xft. Fonts look terrible, meaning, xft seems to work but menus, toolbars, etc. look terrible.
2. install cups. Everything suddenly looks great. preferences->appearance->fonts suddenly has URW Bookman L. Where'd that come from?? 

Hugo.




I'm running Sid and it was mostly mozilla that was the problem with ugly
fonts.  I'm mostly in either mozilla or xterm.  Xterm fonts have always
been fine, although they are not anti-aliased.

I finally got things acceptable in mozilla by really trimming down my "Files"
section:

Section "Files"
        RgbPath      "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb"
        ModulePath   "/usr/X11R6/lib/modules"

        FontPath        "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/Speedo"
        FontPath        "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/misc"
        FontPath        "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi"
        FontPath        "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi"
EndSection

And then in /etc/fonts/fonts.conf:

        <dir>/usr/share/fonts</dir>
        <dir>/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1</dir>
        <dir>/usr/local/share/fonts</dir>

I still don't understand fontconfig.  I thought fontconfig was used for
selecting the best font and then X still rendered them and therefore the
font paths listed in fonts.conf needed to also be in XF86Config-4.  But
that does not seem to be the case.  I have a huge font selection list in
Mozilla and OpenOffice.

xlsfonts doesn't show many fonts

  $ xlsfonts | wc -l
  1257

I think I could add more paths to my "Files" section, but my thinking is
to use the minimum required.

  $ locate fonts.dir | wc -l
  52

I suppose a number of those are empty (or maybe symlinks so duplicates).

I can add this line

   FontPath        "/var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/TrueType"

and I get more fonts listed in xlsfonts (another 550 fonts), but I don't
seen any difference in any of my applications when I do that.

Oh:



Section "Files"
       FontPath        "unix/:7101"                    # local font server
       FontPath        "unix/:7100"                    # local font serveri



I also used to have "unix/:7100" which, as far as I can tell, just
duplicated the fonts I have listed above (indeed adding the font server
in just exactly doubled the number of fonts reported from xlsfonts).  So I see
no use for the xfs font server at all and thus removed it.
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