Description of Problem: Turning off anti-aliased fonts seems to only turn off hinting and not fall back to using the normal X font handling (non Xft). I think this isn't a good thing. Why? Because I for one hate antialiased fonts as it looks like everything is blurry and when I turn them off they look ugly as hell because Xft does not make a good job with no antialiased fonts. Better yet, there should be a separate option associated with the one above mentioned to turn off Xft. This applies to kde as well as gnome/gtk+-2 based apps. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How Reproducible: Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3. Actual Results: Expected Results: Additional Information:
I couldn't agree more. After upgrading to RH8, all fonts suddenly look liks s*** here. I thought they were rendered by xfs, and actually i can't even start X if xfs isn't running. But even if xlsfonts list all fonts neither KDE nor Gnome can see my TT fonts, for instance. They see them only after i add them to ~/.fonts and run fc-cache. So instead of the crisp clear truetype fonts i used to have, i now seem to have a choise between "fuzzy cottonball" or "barbed wired" look. Both outright ugly compared to how things looked under RH7.2/7.3. Is there any way to prevent Xft from being used in the first place? Adding self to CC.
uh oh.. Is Xft perhaps the only way (apart from xtt) to render truetype fonts at all on XFree86 4.2.0 ? Right now I am not loading "freetype" or any other font modules from XF86Config - the only server running is xfs. It used to be xfs with xfsft compiled in. Gnome2 snapshots from Ximian still looked crisp clear while using the XFree86 that came with RH7.3. But the RH8 version og Gnome2 has fonts with blurred edges - and if i choose not to anti-alias them, they become even harder to read - "m" looks like "rn" etc. How on earth do i get the good un-aliased font-rendering back? Please advice.
You can use TrueType fonts by adding them to a /usr/share/fonts/default subdirectory (eg. /usr/share/fonts/default/TrueType)and running fc-cache (and restarting xfs). You don't need to load freetype in XF86Config. To get un-anti-aliased fonts which actually look good (without Xft) you have to run qtconfig and disable antialiased font rendering in it for QT and define "export GDK_USE_XFT=0" somewhere (like your ~/.bashrc) for GTK2 (there should be a gtkconfig of some sort too). PS: Since I think (I'm not actually a fundamentalist on this matter) that antialiased fonts look better than non anti-aliased ones at some sizes (i.e. really big or really small) I can only wish that Xft could at some point in the future render un-antialiased fonts as well as the old font engine so that we could have the best of both worlds.
To me, anti-aliasing fonts under Linux doesn't look good before the fonts are at least 20px or more. AA'ing anything smaller and it looks blurred. I don't use "cleartype" on XP either, and that implementation is much more mature than on Linux. Basically.. antialiasing small fonts is as fun as sucking a wet sock. If you ask me. Which you didn't.. Anyways: cer09566.unl.pt: you saved my day! :)
in 7.2 , 8.0 , fedora code I had & still have bad non-antialiased fonts In 7.3 I haven't. Every time I upgrade I have to replace distro's XFree86 with downloaded from XFree86.org. The problem,I think, is about xft+xrender.