Re: Fonts, one more time
<halbtaxabo-debian@yahoo.com> writes:
> There have been a number of postings about fonts over the last few
> months. But the discussion seems to me to miss the point.
Since this is kind of a meta-rant, a meta-answer seems to be
appropriate...
> If you install Windows, you don't have to know anything about fonts,
> really. Text just looks good in all applications.
Windows has a big advantage here in that there's only one way to draw
things under Windows. Under Linux (and X in general), only very basic
drawing primitives are offered; there are several higher-level
toolkits, but this is where things start to break down. Under
Windows, "prettiness" has happened once, and since every program uses
the Windows toolkit, every program looks "nice". Under Linux, both
the GNOME and KDE people have tried to implement "prettiness"
(differently), plus there are still lots of Xaw/Xt programs out there,
and things that are based on GNOME 1 vs. GNOME 2, and things that
ignore the widget kits entirely...it's not hard to see why the
situation kind of sucks under Linux, but it's also very hard to fix
it.
> If you install Debian Woody, text looks like shit, if you are used
> to Windows quality.
I suspect some of this depends on what you install. If you go the
all-KDE route, things will probably look fine. (Well, hopefully.) If
you go the all-GNOME 2 route, you'll probably do almost as well. If
you go with twm and xterm as your primary UI, it'll always suck. :-)
Keep in mind that X didn't even have the concept of scalable fonts
until relatively recently in its history, and still doesn't have
standardized support for "pretty" things like transparency and
antialiased fonts.
(And I'm vaguely surprised that there's not an XFree86-specific X
extension for transparency, or if there is, that applications don't
use it. I imagine there's a good technical reason why the standard X
font drawing routines can't do antialiasing, but I'm not enough of an
X guru to know that. I'm still holding out for an Emacs built on top
of a modern widget kit, either KDE or GNOME 2, with antialiased font
support, preferably built out of XEmacs. :-)
> Select Linux-friendly devices when buying new computer
> Insert Woody CD in new computer
> Switch on computer
> Answer questions about hardware
> Select default answers to all other questions
This also may be where the "maybe Debian isn't right for you" stock
answer comes in. For example, Knoppix appears to be aiming for the
"installs itself without asking hardware questions and gives you
pretty KDE" market, while still having some Debian underneath. I'm
sure other people can suggest other alternatives more aimed at this.
> What does it take to fix this problem?
Fundamentally, solving a Linux religious war (GNOME vs. KDE), and
porting every application to the winner. :-(
--
David Maze dmaze@debian.org http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal."
-- Abra Mitchell
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