I've spent some time looking in the details of the KDE problem with
Antialiasing and have found the following issues, some of which have
been mentioned here before:
- The XRender extension is working completely independent of the font
server, you have to add all directories containing Type1 and TTF fonts
to /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/XftConfig and can _not_ use the high quality
Bitmap fonts like Helvetica and LucidaTypewriter.
- The fonts.dir and fonts.alias files are ignored by Xft, so you will
get different font names e.g. for URW fonts with AA/non-AA.
If you access your machine from different X servers, you most likely
will have to set the fonts new every time you go from non-AA to AA.
- Qt can not use Xft and normal X fonts within one application. The setting
is controlled by the QT_XFT environment variable.
- Qt can not determine wether fonts served through Xft are monospaced or
proportional fonts, causing applications depending on monospaced fonts
(konsole, khexedit, ...) to behave strangely.
- The KDE font dialog has a bad last resort behaviour. When using Xft, it
does not find any monospaced fonts and offers only the font "fixed",
which may or may not exist.
- The KDE font loading functions break with Xft. When a nonexisting
font is requested, even if it is aliased in XftConfig, they do not
return the replaced font but instead the alphabetically first one.
If you are lucky, that is Arial or Bookman Charter, but it can also
get very ugly, depending on your installed fonts.
On a fresh installation this will always happen, because "Helvetica" is
hardcoded into kdelibs but does not exist.
- The supplied XftConfig file assumes that monotype.com, Microsoft Verdana
and the Microsoft Web Fonts are installed, but they are currently not
shipped with Linux Mandrake.
The fonts that are included in the distribution are mostly not found atm.
- Most truetype fonts in Mandrake are optimized for printing rather than
screen display. High quality fonts that work with Xft are usually
available only when they are copied from another operating system.
The defaults are far worse that the bitmap fonts and will make your
eyes hurt!
- Not all drivers in XFree86 are supported by Xft and there is no list
which are and which not. Most success have been reported by people with
Matrox MGA while nVidia GeForce does not work yet with the "nvidia"
driver, only with "nv".
- Appearently only one display is supported in Matrox dual head configurations.
- There are (very rarely) X server segfaults related to Xft. I had one when
experimenting with changes in XftConfig, but it was not reproducible.
- Sometimes text screens rendered with Xft are messed up, you have to
redraw the display.
I guess it is obvious that antialiasing is currently still to be considered
alpha quality for KDE and must not be included as default in the distribution.
Switching it off in /usr/share/config/kdeglobals is definitely the way
to go IMO.
I have a workaround for the KDE font selection dialog and am working on
fixing the KDE font loader. When that is done, it is possible to supply
a XftConfig file that works with and without Microsoft fonts.
Does anyone already have an RPM with the Microsoft fonts from Keith?
Please, Mandrake people: What is your distribution policy for these files?
Can they be supplied in contrib? possibly even in the standard distribution?
Arnd <><
