Bug 73203 - RFE: non anti-aliased fixed font
Summary: RFE: non anti-aliased fixed font
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED NOTABUG
Alias: None
Product: Red Hat Public Beta
Classification: Retired
Component: fontconfig
Version: null
Hardware: i386
OS: Linux
medium
medium
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Owen Taylor
QA Contact:
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2002-08-31 19:36 UTC by Need Real Name
Modified: 2008-05-01 15:38 UTC (History)
2 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2002-09-03 16:10:51 UTC
Embargoed:


Attachments (Terms of Use)

Description Need Real Name 2002-08-31 19:36:14 UTC
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:

Comment 1 Nalin Dahyabhai 2002-09-02 17:01:07 UTC
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.

Comment 2 Need Real Name 2002-09-02 18:23:53 UTC
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.

Comment 3 Nalin Dahyabhai 2002-09-02 19:37:52 UTC
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.

Comment 4 Owen Taylor 2002-09-03 16:10:45 UTC
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?




Comment 5 Need Real Name 2002-09-03 17:12:37 UTC
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.


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