From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686) Gecko/20030703 Galeon/1.3.6 Description of problem: Something in the fonts or font rendering code has changed; the default Luxi font family is rendered a bit off compared to Red Hat 9. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Just look at any application under X with the default desktop
I agree. Something changed in the new freetype that makes Luxi look ugly. I put up a web page with screenshots comparing rhl9 with severn here: http://216.226.44.198/font-problem/
THe "Here is Severn with bytecode interpreter turned on" screenshot looks like you've somehow switched from "Best Shapes" to "Best Contrast" in the font properties dialog. (Note that having the bytecode interpreter turned on is a config we support)
OK, I think I tracked this one down ... a mistake in the spec file (or change in fontconfig's configure options) meant that the wrong font directories were appearing in /etc/fonts/fonts.conf, so the wrong version of Luxi Sans was used - TrueType instead of Type1. (/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF should not be in the list.) With the TrueType bytecode interpreter, "Best Shapes" vs. "Best Contrast" doesn't make a difference, so you got the ugly "Best Shapes" appearance.
Removing /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF from fonts.conf worked for me. Everything is nice and clean. Can this be put in rawhide, please?
* Mon Sep 22 2003 Owen Taylor <otaylor> 2.2.1-6.0 - Should have been passing --with-add-fonts, not --with-add-dirs to configure ... caused wrong version of Luxi to be used. (#100862)