Leslie Katz wrote:
Thanks for directing me to the "Font Rendering Details" box, of which I was unaware. However, when I tried it, it didn't seem to change anything. Also, in another post, Glen Turner said (at least, I understood him to say) that any change in a value in that box wouldn't survive a reboot. He suggested a more wide ranging configuration change, which I'm trying to follow. At the same time, I'll play around some more with that box, to see if I can make it work at all.
That's not quite what I said. There's multiple items all acting together here to form a complete mess. X11 starts and calculates a DPI for the screen. This is 75DPI in the absence of other information (from the xorg.conf file or from DCC to the monitor for some drivers). GNOME can override this DPI. Obviously, that's a per-user change, and not really satisfactory if multiple people log in to the box, and it really sucks if you have multiple screens (like a laptop with a panel and VGA output). All this effects the actual size of a 12 point character. We want it to be 12/72 inches (=1/6th inch) tall on our screen. Now GNOME can also be told to use a character larger than 12 point for the default font. Now individual applications can use the default GNOME font, and many can be configured with their own font and font size. This is particularly useful with Firefox, as lots of web sites use ridiculously small characters -- which they only get away with as Windows fixes the DPI to 100, and on a typical 75DPI screen characters were 25% larger than specified. But you can see the level of whinging from Windows users now that they are still running 100DPI but their monitor is really 150DPI and characters are 25% smaller than specified. Since this is such a disaster Firefox allows the font size to be zoomed pretty easily. And Microsoft's Vista will use the actual DPI of the screen, just like X Windows does today. A related complication is fonts. There are two types of fonts -- bitmap and scalable -- and two font mechanisms -- X font server and freetype+fontconfig+render. A program can only use one font mechanism, and modern GNOMEified programs use freetype+fontconfig+render. Older X11 applications use the X font server. The bitmap fonts only work with the X font server. They come in 75DPI and 100DPI variants. Configure xfs to select the best fit by default. The X font server also supports scalable fonts -- PostScript Type 1 fonts, TrueType fonts, and OpenType fonts. It's not enough to drop these into the font directory, there a stack of font description files that need to be built. Freetype+fontconfig+render only supports the scalable fonts. Which is fine, since the age of bitmap fonts is past us. Configuration is simple -- put the fonts in a directory under one mentioned in /etc/fonts/*.conf and the files describing the fonts are automatically created when needed. Sorry that all this is such a mess, Glen -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
