Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 34591
Anti-aliased fonts totally broken! (QA0401)
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:38:00 EDT
This is with QA0401. I activated the "Anti-aliased fonts" options in KDE. Restarted KDE. . Now the fonts are all totally hosed. The font for _everything_ now seems to have been set to the true type font "Arbia" (the first one alphabetically). Unfortunately this font is a handwriting-like font and totally unreadable (especially when small). . Furthermore, I brought up the control centre and went to "Look and feel -> Fonts". Pressing "Use Defaults" filled the font choices with sensible looking font choices. But upon pressing "Apply", KDE pauses a bit but most of your fonts are still left as the unreadable Ariba font.
I consider this serious - the AA font capabilities are perhaps the most touted feature of the new KDE2.1/Qt2.3/XFree4.0.3 combination. . If it can't get fixed, then the checkbox to enable AA fonts should be greyed out or removed. Better not ship an option which knackers the desktop :-)
This is caused by the fact that the Xrender extension is pretty much a work in progress. If it can't find a suitable font (and the "normal" fonts, like Helvetica, aren't suitable for anti-aliasing), it has no way of knowing what font should be used, so it picks any font. (It does respect fixed width vs. proportional settings though). The specific workaround for KDE is to enable anti-aliasing and pick other fonts in kcontrol/Look & Feel/Fonts -- we don't do this by default because the other fonts don't look as well as the default fonts when AA is turned off. Disabling the AA option in KControl is not a good fix because it works quite well once you pick suitable fonts in KControl/Look & Feel/Fonts. Setting to "deferred" as in "waiting for Xrender to stabilize".
Can we revisit this? There are issues with RH7.2beta3. Note that the XRender BETA status seems to be resolved. Also, RedHat are using AA fonts in the default GNOME desktop (via Nautilus). Also, the KDE setup screen will use AA fonts by default if you select a fast processor option. So I think AA fonts are fair play in RH7.2 . Onto the bug, which is irritating! When AA fonts are activated in KDE, every damn font defaults to fixed width courier. Sure, it's AA but it's ugly and unreadable as hell. So go to the control centre, fonts section. Hit "Defaults". Sure enough, decent font choices appear, Helvetica in my case. And, the demo Helvetica text is beautifully AA rendered! However, when you OK the change, it is largely ignored. The fonts used on the desktop do not change. On re-entering the font dialog, the choices have snapped back to useless courier. . Can this get fixed? I'm so close to a lovely AA desktop :-)
This is fixed in RC1. Make sure you installed urw-fonts and ttfonts though (and make sure you're using the current XFree86, there are big problems with XftConfig in earlier versions)