fontification

[waider]

Apparently The low quality of fonts on Linux operating systems has been a thorn in the side of Linux users for years. I can't say I'd noticed while reading this; something to do with Red Hat's rather tidy integration of the Xft bits in Red Hat 9, I guess.

Comments

[mskala.livejournal.com]

I'm not upset about quality of fonts, but I'm sure upset about difficulty of font configuration. As far as I can tell, to make a font accessible in (La)TeX, GIMP, X11, or a Web browser, it has to be configured in a different place and in a different, incompatible and poorly documented way, for each - even though there are at least some font formats that all those things claim to support. Let alone fonts for the text console, the fun that comes from trying to make my computer display Japanese text without turning Japanese entirely, etc.

Mind you, font configuration seems to really suck under all the operating systems where I've attempted it, so Linux is in good company there.

[waider.livejournal.com]

As of Red Hat 9, and possibly beginning in the rather ill-fated Red Hat 8, you simply drop your font file in ~/.fonts, or put a <dir> specification into ~/.fonts.conf, and lo, anything that's Xft-enabled (which on Red Hat appears to be all the Gtk and KDE stuff they distribute, including Mozilla and Gimp) has new fonts. No tweaking of font aliases or anything required. It's entirely possible that the crazy Red Hat folks have stuffed Xft support into the X font server, in which case noone escapes the new fonts. Not sure on that latter issue, mind, since Xft is a good deal more flexible that xfs.

LaTeX is its own problem, since it's got a font system that's utterly different from everyone else's and thus has to be configured manually regardless of where you set it up.

[wisn.livejournal.com]

Font management is half the issue. Font rendering quality has ranged from 'ass' to 'not as good as what i've already got, thank you' in various window managers for years, and inconsistency between applications only adds to the problems - the only thing worse than 'bad' is 'unpredictable'. That said, the news.com bulletin is annoying: Is Lycoris bundling the same Bitstream fonts that Bitstream's made available for Linux for years already? Will Bitstream fonts improve an environment if the problem has been rendering, not design?

[bitpuddle.livejournal.com]

RedHat 9 was a step forward, but Linux desktops still have really weak font support. If you were lucky enough to get Mozilla and Xft working together, you'd still find yourself in the land of scary bitmapped fonts more often than is healthy.

Typography is tough, because Linux distros will have to get both high-quality typefaces and a rational typography library. Right now, there are competing solutions, popular apps statically linked to one thing or another, things coded to Gnome, KDE, and directly to X all trying to coexist.

It is all rather frightening. But it is better than it used to be.

[waider.livejournal.com]

Actually, with Xft and a source of Windows fonts (e.g. dual boot box with a windows partition; crossover plugin; crossover office; mstcorefonts package) you pretty much avoid bitmapped fonts for as long as some web designer who knows better doesn't try to force his notion of a TTF font on you. Even then, Xft copes pretty well with falling back, and you can even configure it to cope better without getting a degree in astrophysics.

But the point I was trying to make is that, well, jeez. I'd not been particularly bothered by the fonts. Even the blocky ones. And I suspect that until recently, the core of Linux users would have been in the same boat. To say it's been a thorn in the side of Linux users for years is kinda leaning heavily on the melodrama button.

[bitpuddle.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing it is a personal thing. I've hated the weirdo Linux font situation since Windows and MacOS started antialiasing things. Linux fell behind at that point.

I was one of those people who didn't have a source of Windows fonts, and who didn't really want to fiddle with X, having really screwed it up more than once.

[waider.livejournal.com]

I was one of those people who didn't have a source of Windows fonts, and who didn't really want to fiddle with X, having really screwed it up more than once.

In which case you should check out Core Fonts at SourceForge.

Actually, I'm not sure that's still viable. There's at least one other corefonts package out there, and I think there's even an apt-get'able version on debian, but anyway.