One of my pet peeves about Linux on the desktop has always been its
absolutely terrible font support. No anti-aliased fonts, combined
with terrible fonts means that lots of applications, including web
browsers look terrible.
One of the nice things about upgrading to RedHat 7.2, or Debian is that there's support for anti-aliased fonts in QT out of the box. This means that if you run KDE, which is based on the QT widget set, your entire desktop, and apps, will inherit anti-aliased fonts, and font settings. I browse using Opera, mainly because it's fast, good, and uses QT, so I automatically inherit QT's anti-aliased fonts:
Here's a shot of my entire desktop:
You can see Opera, Konqueror, and an xterm, all using anti-aliased fonts. Enabling anti-aliasing in XFree86 4.0.2+Anti-aliasing requires both support in QT, and hardware support. To my knowledge, all recent Matrox and nvidia cards support the RENDER extension. To check, while running XFree86 > 4.0.2, and run: $ xdpyinfo
name of display: :0.0
version number: 11.0
vendor string: The XFree86 Project, Inc
vendor release number: 40100000
XFree86 version: 4.1.0
maximum request size: 4194300 bytes
motion buffer size: 256
bitmap unit, bit order, padding: 32, LSBFirst, 32
image byte order: LSBFirst
number of supported pixmap formats: 7
supported pixmap formats:
depth 1, bits_per_pixel 1, scanline_pad 32
depth 4, bits_per_pixel 8, scanline_pad 32
depth 8, bits_per_pixel 8, scanline_pad 32
depth 15, bits_per_pixel 16, scanline_pad 32
depth 16, bits_per_pixel 16, scanline_pad 32
depth 24, bits_per_pixel 32, scanline_pad 32
depth 32, bits_per_pixel 32, scanline_pad 32
keycode range: minimum 8, maximum 255
focus: window 0x1a14af2, revert to Parent
number of extensions: 26
BIG-REQUESTS
DOUBLE-BUFFER
DPMS
Extended-Visual-Information
FontCache
GLX
LBX
MIT-SCREEN-SAVER
MIT-SHM
MIT-SUNDRY-NONSTANDARD
RENDER
SECURITY
SGI-GLX
SHAPE
SYNC
TOG-CUP
XC-APPGROUP
XC-MISC
XFree86-Bigfont
XFree86-DGA
XFree86-Misc
XFree86-VidModeExtension
XInputExtension
XKEYBOARD
XTEST
XVideo
[... lots of other output...]
After that, make sure that your XF86Config file (/etc/X11/XF86Config-4 on RedHat and Debian systems) has both "freetype" and "type1" Load lines:
[...]
# Module loading section
Section "Module"
Load "dbe" # Double-buffering
Load "GLcore" # OpenGL support
Load "dri" # Direct rendering infrastructure
Load "glx" # OpenGL X protocol interface
Load "extmod" # Misc. required extensions
Load "v4l" # Video4Linux
# Load "pex5" # PHIGS for X 3D environment (obsolete)
# Load "record" # X event recorder
# Load "xie" # X Image Extension (obsolete)
# You only need the following two modules if you do not use xfs.
Load "freetype" # TrueType font handler
Load "type1" # Adobe Type 1 font handler
EndSection
[...]
This ensures that the XFree86 modules needed to support anti-aliasing are loaded. Now that XFree86 is configured and supports anti-aliasing, we'll need to actually to find some TrueType fonts, so that we can use them. Under RedHat, I copied TrueType fonts into /usr/share/fonts/default/TrueType/. If you have a Windows box you can simply copy TrueType fonts from the \Windows\Fonts folder. If not, Microsoft has a few free TrueType fonts for download here. Since RedHat 7.2 uses xfs as a font-server to serve fonts to X applications, I consulted /etc/X11/fs/config to see where it was configured to look for TrueType fonts:
[...]
# where to look for fonts
#
catalogue = /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc:unscaled,
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi:unscaled,
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi:unscaled,
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc,
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1,
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Speedo,
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/CID,
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi,
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi,
/usr/share/fonts/default/TrueType,
/usr/share/fonts/default/Type1,
/usr/share/fonts/ja/TrueType,
/usr/share/AbiSuite/fonts
[...]
I also made sure that my /etc/X11/XftConfig file referenced the directory I copied my fonts into:
$ more /etc/X11/XftConfig
# This file was automatically generated by gdkxft.
# It should contain a reasonable Xft configuration given your
# X server and fontserver setup.
includeif "~/.xftconfig"
match any family == "fixed" edit family =+ "LuciduxMono";
match any family == "serif" edit family += "LuciduxSerif";
match any family == "sans" edit family += "LuciduxSans";
match any family == "mono" edit family += "LuciduxMono";
dir "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/Type1"
dir "/usr/share/fonts/default/TrueType"
[...]
$ xftcache
After copying my fonts to the proper location, I ran the following commands:
$ cd /usr/share/fonts/default/TrueType
$ ttmkfdir -o fonts.dir
$ /etc/rc.d/init.d/xfs restart
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