From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.5) Gecko/20011012 Description of problem: After upgrading from RH 7.0 to RH 7.2, truetype fonts were displayed badly. It looks like they are horizontally condensed. I've verified that both using xfs as font-server and using the freetype module of the xserver without xfs. The same fonts (I've tested it with Arial) worked without problems on RH 7.0. (XFree86-4.0.1-1) using the freetype module. I've written a small script that displays a font in several sizes (fontdisp) to be able to reproduce the bug. Screenshots of the output (rh72-arial-xserver.png, rh72-arial-xserver.png) and the tested fonts can be found at: http://leo.kloburg.at/x11-truetype/ Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: (ttf-fonts are installed in /usr/local/share/fonts/truetype) ----------------------------------------------- A) Using the freetype-module of XFree86-4.1.0-3 ----------------------------------------------- 1) xset fp= /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc:unscaled,/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi:unscaled,/usr/local/share/fonts/truetype 2) xset fp rehash 3) ./fontdisp or xfontsel -scaled -pattern "-monotype-arial-medium-r-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*" 4) xwd | convert xwd:- rh72-arial-xserver.png ----------------------------------------------- B) Using XFree86-xfs-4.1.0-3 ----------------------------------------------- 1) xset fp= unix/:7100 2) xset fp rehash 3) chkfontpath 1: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc:unscaled 2: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi:unscaled 3: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi:unscaled 4: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc 5: /usr/local/share/fonts/truetype 4) ./fontdisp or xfontsel -scaled -pattern "-monotype-arial-medium-r-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*" 5) xwd | convert xwd:- rh72-arial-xfs.png Actual Results: In both cases the results look horizontally condensed, which becomes unreadable when using small font-sizes. An example screen using mozilla is avaliable at: http://leo.kloburg.at/x11-truetype/rh72-mozilla-arial.png Expected Results: The results should look more expanded, I've created a test-image rendered directly from the ttf-file using ftstrpnm from freetype-utils: http://leo.kloburg.at/x11-truetype/ttf-arial.png (The script that produces this image is ttfmontage.) I'll produce a screenshot on RH 7.0 (where font rendering works) tomorrow. Additional info: I've already verified that there is no other font with the same name in my fontpath. The tested font (arial.ttf) comes from win2k, the output of ftdump (freetype-utils) can be found at: http://leo.kloburg.at/x11-truetype/ftdump-arial.txt
Remove /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc from your font path, leaving only the :unscaled version there. One known cause for oddly scaled fonts, is if the X server cannot determine the display dimensions properly. Look at the XF86Config manpage, for the "DisplaySize" option. Try using that option to override this. Does this change anything?
Thanks for your hint! Adding the "DisplaySize" option to my "Monitor" Section fixed my problem. Looks like the DPI settings were wrong. (Strange, I thought the default values are 75x75 DPI?) Maybe my screen resolution of 1152x864 confuses the X-server or my the nv (Nvidia) driver querys the wrong EDID values from my Monitor (IBM P70)? I've tried it on another RH 7.2 System with 1024x768, using the NVIDIA (not the nv) driver from www.nvidia.com and it worked without the DisplaySize option...
I am also having similar font problems. I upgraded a system from RH 7.1 to RH 7.2 using the upgrade option. Many fonts displayed by Mozilla (0.95) show exactly the same problems. For example, Nick Petreley's site www.varlinux.org now displays with distorted fonts, whereas with RH 7.1 there were not any problems. My font problems went beyond that however. After the upgrade completed and I logged back into my account, all menu and display fonts in KDE were set to Arial Black! The root account on this system still has that setting as nothing I do seems to revert the fonts back to default. Many KDE apps still display the Arial Black font for menus (e.g. kuser) and text. I sure could use some help fixing this. Will I have to do a clean install of RH 7.2? Instead of an upgrade? Thanks, Brad bgsmith
As an additional note: I did try setting the DisplaySize option in the monitor section of the config file. It had not effect that I could detect. The font rendering of, say, varlinx.org is still off in much the same way as described by Leo above. Thanks, Brad
Am experiencing the same problem. How should I determine the value for the DisplaySize option, so that I can try it out?
Please ignore previous comment. Found appropriate attributes for DisplaySize, and it also corrected my "thin fonts" problem. Not a terribly attractive solution for an end-user, though.
I have similar problems with truetype fonts. After an upgrade from 7.1 to 7.2 nothing conncected with truetype fonts work anymore. I get wrong rendering and am not able to use them properly for writing documents. There seems to be a problem with UTF-8 too. I used to use Arial Unicode MS for viewing web pages in Farsi or other Unicode encoded pages. But since after the upgrade this is completley lost. I have had clean installs of 7.2 as well as updrages and the result is the same. This is crucial for example for our work on KDE's translation into Farsi. RH Linux 7.2 seems not to be useful in this regard. Does anyone know where the problem could be and how to fix this?
A similar experience here. A resolution of "1152x864" produces identical results to those posted by <leo.ac.at>. Adding the DisplaySize option in /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 solves this. Other resolutions however ("1024x768" and "1280x960" tested) render the fonts correctly and do not need that tweaking. Hardware: Video Card: ATI Rage 128 PF Monitor: Sony CPD G220 (17")
The DisplaySize option is the correct way to fix this. It is viewed as a workaround my some people, however X has no way of guessing a monitor's dimensions if it can't probe them, other than just guessing. In this case, manual configuration by using DisplaySize is necessary.