Sorry for replying to myself, but I just solved (sort of) one
of the problems.
On Fri, 27 Apr 2001, I wrote:
> It seems there are at least two problems with the fonts that add up
> to the uglyness:
> - Type 1 rendering is far worse than it used to be. Running 'xset +fp
> /usr/share/fonts/default/Type1' mostly reproduces the problems on a
> Mandrake 7.2 system, but the fonts still don't look /that/ bad.
This problem is caused by an actual bug in the type 1 font loading.
When compiling XFree86 (tested 4.0.2, 4.0.3 and 4.0.99) with
gcc-2.96-0.48mdk, you have to give the flag '-fno-force-mem' in
RPM_OPT_FLAGS. No problems with gcc-2.95.2 or egcs-1.1.2-44mdk.
The problem is XFree86-4.0.3/xc/lib/fonts/Type1/type1.c, unfortunately
I could not localize it any more to fix the source itself. The source
file makes heavy use of inlining and macros, so I would not completely
outrule a compiler bug related to that.
You can see the effects of this on
http://users.evitech.fi/~arndb/cooker-type1-fonts/ . Note that it
still looks kind of ugly even in the fixed version, but that is
just because I used the URW-fonts for demonstration purpose.
At least it now gets readable...
There is also the working libtype1.a module, but the version that
came with Mandrake 7.2 has exactly the same effect, since it was
compiled with gcc-2.95.2 which did not produce this bug.
The module should work as a drop-in replacement for any of the
versions I tested, including the one from Mandrake 8.0.
Arnd <><
