Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 73203
RFE: non anti-aliased fixed font
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:38:03 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020809 Description of problem: On my laptop (IBM X22), every font available to the gnome-terminal (after a default install) has hard-to-read characters. I believe all available fonts are anti-aliased, and it appears that the anti-aliasing is what causes the problem. Can we have "fixed misc" back, without anti-aliasing? It would be nice to have such a font available in gnome-terminal, instead of forcing use of xterm instead. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: n/a Additional info:
The terminal isn't capable of anti-aliasing bitmapped fonts, such as those included in the bitmap-fonts package (lucidatypewriter). My understanding of "fixed" is that they're not so much a set of the same font at different sizes (like lucidatypewriter) as they are a set of random faces at random sizes, so including them in the bitmap-fonts package isn't desirable. If necessary, you can pull the fonts from /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc, decompress them, and place them in your ~/.fonts directory. You'll then be able to use them in any application, including gnome-terminal.
I made a ~/.fonts dir, copied the fonts/misc files to it and decompressed them, but gnome-terminal->edit profile->font didn't list them. As far as that goes, xlsfonts shows all the misc-fixed fonts, but gnome-terminal doesn't. In case I my original submission was confusing, I don't care about antialiasing in my terminals -- I care about readability and size. About size: if I can only fit one terminal per virtual screen (workspace, whatever), then I'm going to be very cross. Unfortunately the fonts available through gnome-terminal's font chooser only look good when they are too large. For now xterm is good enough (small and readable), but I'd hate to see the gnome-terminal replaced permanantly by xterm.
Try running "fc-cache ~/.fonts" to generate a fontconfig cache in the directory. (While this shouldn't be necessary, it can't hurt.) You may need to restart gnome-terminal (and because gnome-terminal uses factory mode by default, you'll either need to shut down all of your gnome-terminal windows, or start one manually with the --disable-factory flag). Basically, once "fc-list" shows the "Fixed" family of fonts, you'll be able to use them pretty much anywhere.
I'm not really sure why this was assigned to fontconfig. I'm certainly not going to change the default monospace font to be a bitmap: A) A bitmap only looks good at certain sizes, B) The appearance of the desktop as a whole is best if antialiasing/not-antialiasing is consistent between all uses of text. bug 68354 covers the request to add the misc-fixed fonts to the bitmap fonts package. Not sure went wrong with your attempt to install fonts by copying them into ~/.fonts - I tried: mkdir ~/.fonts cd fonts cp /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/7x13.pcf.gz . cp /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/9x15.pcf.gz . gunzip *.gz And I had a "Fixed" font with those two sizes. Maybe you grabbed, say, the ISO8859-1 copies of the font instead of the base unicode fonts?
I got the ~/.fonts stuff to work the second time around, after calling fc-cache and mkfontdir. I'm not sure that either of those additional steps were actually necessry; perhaps I made some other mistake the first time around. I certainly didn't want you to change the default desktop font to -misc-fixed or some other bitmap; I just wanted nice-looking fonts for my laptop that allowed 4 simultaneous terminals at 1024x768 (and they didn't need to be the default). Given that bug 68354 suggests adding more fonts, I'm going to close this bug with NOTABUG.