Better Fonts for X11? · Slashdot Mirror

Posted by Cliff on Friday February 9, 2001 @11:39AM from the anti-aliased-sans-serif-oblique-narrow dept.

Shadow_Font asks: "So I've been using XFree since RedHat 4.1 or so (I'm using XFree 3.3.6 on FreeBSD 4.2 nowadays). I've been using Macs since the 128K machine in 1984. The biggest reason I don't use X day in and day out for development is the status of fonts on the platform. They're just horrible! What's being done about this? Does anyone care about this? X fonts have been a sore sight and far worse than what I had on my Mac in 1984, and yet here we are 17 years down the pike. Are there any solutions? Until I can figure out a solution, my main development machine will continue to be a Macintosh with its anti-aliased text which really makes reading code for hours on end easier on the eyes." Give it a few more months folks, and X11 fonts will improve. And if the traditional 75 and 100dpi fonts are too repulsive for you, support for TrueType and Postscript Type 1 fonts has been around for quite a while.

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Upgrade by jfunk · 2001-02-09 08:36 · Score: 5

I upgraded to XFree86 4 and the default fonts are pretty nice. I prefer sans serif fonts and I'm using KDE 2 at 1280x1024.

The fun part is that SuSE included a happy script called 'getmsttfonts' with their XFree4 packages that grabs all of Microsoft's free fonts from ftp.microsoft.com, uncompresses them, and installs them. Ready for immediate use.

I don't find them any better. I have them there, but I'm still using the default helvetica, 100dpi for pretty much everything.

So, the first step is probably going to be upgrading to XFree86 4.