Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 68681
XFree86 gnome-terminal fonts look awful
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:44:07 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020625 Description of problem: Toshiba Satellite 1800 notebook (1024x768 generic display). The fonts for gnome-terminal look hoorible, almost unreadable. The font emacs uses is very legible on the same machine. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Open gnome terminal 2. 3. Actual Results: Almost unreadable fonts Expected Results: On RH 7.3 the fonts look fine Additional info: A note on the 'net says this might be due to not installing the XFree86 75 and 10o dpi fonts, both are installed here.
Owen, Havoc: Known issue?
Without a screenshot I can't really say. It's not an XFree86 problem in any case. Reassigning to fontconfig until we get more information.
I'm sure it is the issue of the fixed terminal font being anti-aliased and not looking quite as good as the bitmapped terminal fonts. Can we possibly switch to a bitmapped terminal font?
I believe that this was probably a problem with fontconfig finding the XFree86-truetype-fonts versions of the Luxi fonts rather than the Type1 versions, and the rendering of the TrueType versions was *much* worse. This has been fixed now by removing that directory from the fontconfig font path. (While people might think that the AA fonts we are using now look fuzzy, or not too their taste, I doubt they would be described as "hoorible, almost unreadable". The way the TrueType versions rendered 1-2 months ago would fit that description.) I'd rather keep our default terminal font AA like the rest of the desktop ... there are definite effects where the eye prefers *consistent* contrast, rather than maximum possible contrast. (I'm not sure the mechanism for this is understood ... it may just be that one instinctively adjusts ones viewing distance from the screen to the optimal distance for a certain type of rendering.)