From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020826 Description of problem: Disabling anti-aliasing in KDE or Gnome leads to very poorly rendered fonts. Non-AA fonts in RedHat 7.x rendered very cleanly. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. disable anti-alias fonts using either KDE font selector or Gnome font selector. 2. logout / login 3. view ugly fonts Actual Results: After switching to non-AA fonts , nearly all fonts (with the odd exception of lucida console) rendered very poorly. Arial, Sans, Serif, etc all rendered poorly. Expected Results: Fonts as crisp as those in RH7.3 Additional info: I tinkered a little trying different fonts , font families and using xfs or using XFree's built in rendering but nothing appeared to have any impact. Fonts displayed using xfontsel (e.g arial , helvetica) rendered very cleanly. xfontsel listed some fonts not available to KDE/GNOME, notably Helvetica. I can provide some screen shots if my explanation is poor. Problem occured on multiple machines (tyan/nvidia , compaq/ati , compaq/matrox , dell/laptop) and multiple screen resolutions.
Font rendering under RH8 is a disaster here too. Similar: bug 75431
Created attachment 80625 [details] screenshot: Mozilla, MSIE5.5 under WINE, and Konqeror - all with non-aliased fonts. Fonts in Konqueror looks very bad - as they do in the rest of KDE3
The freetype package in Red Hat Linux 8.0 has the truetype bytecode interpreter disabled, which is the default for a freetype build from upstream sources. This is due to: http://www.freetype.org/patents.html In order for you to get fonts looking like they did previously in Red Hat Linux 7.3, you'll need to rebuild freetype yourself with the bytecode interpreter enabled. Both GNOME and KDE in Red Hat Linux 8.0 use the Xft2 library for rendering client side fonts. They do not use the legacy XFree86 font support which is provided by the xfs font server (or X server itself if you manually configure X to serve fonts). The only applications which use server side fonts currently are Mozilla, Evolution, xchat, and a few other applications, including some older apps that come with XFree86 itself. xlsfonts shows you what fonts are available via the font server, and NOT what is available to GNOME/KDE via Xft. The solution to these types of problems is one or more of: - install nicer fonts from off the web, from Microsoft, or somewhere else - rebuild freetype with the bytecode interpreter - use AA fonts Anti aliasing, and font hinting are the two primary methods of making truetype fonts look nice. We've disabled the font hinting because of the legal situation with Apple's patents. You've disabled anti-aliasing for whatever reasons. The result is as expected - crap fonts. Absolutely nothing we can do about this. Leave AA fonts enabled if you want nice fonts, and/or re-enable the freetype bytecode interpreter.
I think you misunderstand me.. both the AA and non-AA fonts under Xft2 look like crap to me. The solution was simply to run qtconfig and disable antialiased font rendering in it for QT. And for GTK, to add "export GDK_USE_XFT=0" to .bashrc After a restart all my TT fonts looked like I prefer them; crisp clear and smooth. I've enjoyed TT fonts on RH for the past 4 years and am very pleased with the quality - now also in RH8 :) (I had to copy the tt fonts to ~/.fonts and run fc-cache though. xfs no longer makes Gnome or KDE see my previous TT fonts, allthough xlsfonts lists them. Well - i'm happy again. And for others who read this: There is no need to recompile freetype if all you want is to NOT anti-alias fonts.
I recompiled with the bytecode enabled and non-AA fonts now look fine. Edited ftoption.h and recompiled freetype-* , Xft-* and fontconfig-*, rebuilt all and re-installed all. May not be necessary to rebuild all of those.