Back on 4th.Jan.2004 I lamented the awful looking fonts I saw in some parts of my KDE 3.1.4 desktop even though I (thought I ) had AA switched on. (http://lists.debian.org/debian-kde/2004/debian-kde-200401/msg00011.html)
Following advice from several people here, I did this : 1) Installed XFree86 4.2.1 from www.backports.org, to replace the XFree86 4.1.0 bundled with Woody; this turned out to be easy - apt-get dist-upgrade did everything necessary, without any complication; apparently AA isn't completely supported by 4.1.0 2) Installed the Microsoft Truetype fonts package (apt-get install msttcorefonts) and selected a few of them in KDE Control Centre. (http://www.glimmer.demon.co.uk/kde/ctlcent-font-spec-tt.png) 3) Disabled the exclusion of AA with a range of point sizes in Control Centre (for some reason, this had been the Debian KDE installation default) AA is now truly activated - a screenshot of my new improved Kate Tip-Of-The-Day dialog is here: http://www.glimmer.demon.co.uk/kde/kate-better-font.png The lousy font screenshot I had complained of is still here: http://www.glimmer.demon.co.uk/kde/kate-lousy-font.png As you can see, everything looks a lot better. Some points: a) As a side note, it seems that Konsole isn't complete unless the xfonts-konsole package is installed, so this should be a dependency of Konsole IMHO. b) Some people believe that QT for Woody is compiled without XFT (= AA) support - this does *not* seem to be the case (I use the downloads.kde.org package of QT for Debian Woody). c) AA only works with Truetype fonts (or other scalable font type), and *not* with bitmap fonts - we should put this in a FAQ (or the Wiki perhaps); also, there is no obvious way of telling which fonts are scalable AFAICT in the Control Centre dialog. (is "scalable" the same thing as "outline" ?) Thanks to everyone who helped out. Nick Boyce Bristol, UK -- It is fun to have fun, but you have to know how. --Cat in the Hat
