Bug 68872

Created attachment 65404 [details]
check the crappy font look for "Initializing peripherals"

Seems unrelated. 

Somehow, the font being used here is a badly rendered bitmap; and
thus probably not going through Xft at all. 

One would have to investigate how that text is being drawn.

I'll have to dbl-check, but if I am not mistaken, this looks much better in my
setup...

this is @ 1152x864 res, S3 Savage Pro4 card if that makes a diff - if it's
really bitmap it may just be crappy at certain res's, but 1152x864 seems like it
should be high enough not to suck :)

It really shouldn't be a bitmap at all.

um, ok :)

So where do we go from here?

than?  Any luck on a cause?

Looking at the code, there is nothing very special about this label:

    status_label->setText(text);
    QFont status_font = QFont(status_label->font());
    status_font.setBold(true);
    status_label->setFont(status_font);

Bold fonts seem to work OK in general for me in Qt/KDE.

Does it matter what you have set for your "General Font" in the
KDE control center?

actually - that's kind of interesting - the crappy-looking bold font appears to
be the same as the "window title" font (looks like bold helvetica 12).  I'll
sshot.  Notice how the bold looks bad in the konq window too

Created attachment 65584 [details]
fonts in CC and konq looking bad

interesting side note: in the KDE CC, the default fonts are "helvetica 12"
(mainly) which has helvetica lower-cased.  If you do a "Choose font", *all* the
fonts listed start with a capital letter, so you can't get "back" to "helvetica 12".

Oh. turn on "Use antialising for fonts". Without doing that, things
are going to inevitably going to look sucky.

(I apologize if you aren't a fan of antialiasing; the problem is
that the way we used to do "non-antialiased text" and make it
look good was to use a few selected bitmaps that looked nice.
Unfortunately, this just doesn't work when you are trying to
provide a nice consistent interface to fonts to users and developers -
"you can use Helvetica, but only if you aren't
antialiasing, and only at sizes 12,14, and 18." is making things
really complex and hard to get right.)

We may eventually have embedded bitmaps in our default fonts so
they'll look good non-antialiased at the sizes where we have
bitmaps, and less good elsewhere.)

Getting the default KDE font settings right is a place we still
need to do a fair bit of work.

it's fixed now in kdebase-3.0.2-3. Antialiasing is default on.
start kpersonalizer and choose redhat style it should works fine.

it's still sucky in null in kdm

Things look tons better with kdebase-3.0.3-7.

Things are sorta better with kdebase-3.0.3-7

Here's what I see with that.

Install beta5, get sucky fonts (gotta love that technical jargon ;-) in kdm
up2date, get kdebase-3.0.3-7, still have sucky fonts in kdm
run kcontrol manually, force anti-aliasing on, then get non-sucky kdm fonts

Is there any reason anti-aliasing can't be turned on out of the box?

turn on AntiAliasing as default fixes this bug. 3.0.3-9 has this fixes

kdebase-3.0.3-10 has anti-alias fonts by default.