Slashdot Mirror
Linux Desktop Distros with Quality Fonts?
occamboy writes "I'm trying to make a case for switching to Linux desktops, and would like to demonstrate how advantageous Linux is. While the advantages of Linux are more obvious for us techies, I'm finding that many non-technical types are immediately negatively biased by the look of Linux desktops. The problem boils down to screen fonts. It seems that, in the distributions that I've demonstrated, the screen fonts are either all aliased, or are aliased in some places and antialiased in others, which I've been told resembles a ransom note with letters cut from different magazines. I can understand where these critics are coming from; after all, they are staring at fonts on a monitor all day long. Are there any distributions that I can demonstrate which provide smooth and consistent screen fonts without requiring a lot of messing around?"
try bitstream vera sans and use kde control center to set antialias settings. gnome has a tool too for font stuff. oh and btw stop demoing cli ok?
I recently installed SuSE Professional 9.1 and the fonts look really good. I use Firefox on both Windows and Linux and I even forgot which OS I was using the other day when only the browser was open.
Isn't it pretty much all the same regardless of distribution? It's all the same X. It's all the same KDE and Gnome. Do distribution maintainers really do this much stuff?
I'm not trying to troll but of all the users that I've encounterd none of them would give a second thought to crappy fonts. You don't know how many times I've sat in front of a user's nice LCD monitor set to a non-optimal resolution with antialiasing OFF!
Linux fonts seem to come in two flavours: All aliased(ugly for huge fonts) and All anti-aliased(ugly and unreadable for everything except huge fonts)
They also tend to be rendered in Too Fucking Huge mode a lot (not so huge that anti-aliasing doesnt look like crap, mind you, I just mean "So huge you can't possibly multitask"
I am of the opinion that linux is ugly, and fonts are the primary problem. It's hard to convince me of benifits when things look like crap. People seem not to know that when you've anti-aliased correctly, nobody knows it's there. If I see another dialog box with text that's half-transparent from over-anti-aliased text, I'll scream. I do that a lot.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I'm looking for something that would give me a very general understanding of what's involved in setting up and maintaining a Linux system (I'm thinking Mandrake at the moment). Basically, I want just enough information to decide whether it's worth the bother to give it a try.
I've had people walk up to Mandrake machines, use them for a day, and walk away not realising that it wasn't MS-Windows. If I switched those boxes to XPDE instead of KDE and did a little tweaking, I'm sure it would be easy to fool ten times as many people - if that was my aim.
I was using my laptop (running Mandrake Linux) at a private function last week, and a 10yob I know came up, looked oddly at the screen for a few minutes, then asked "Which Windows are you using?" It took about 15 minutes and much repetition to mostly-convince him that it wasn't running MS-Windows at all, but rather KDE on Linux. This is the level of ignorance we face. This kid knows his own machine inside out, as well as a non-programmer possibly could, but had no clue that anything other than MS-Windows ever existed.
Both Mandrake and SuSE do the font thing well, including different aliasing at different sizes.
I haven't seriously tried other distros for a while but seem to remember some of the Debian-based distros (Gentoo, Knoppix) being happy out of the box nowadays, and probably Lin{spire,dows,insertsuffixhere} but that has other issues you don't want to have to deal with.
If you use the download edition of Mandrake, set it up with the Contribs as a URPMI source, and manually pull down a few things (Flash player, Win32 CoDecs and the like) from the Penguin Liberation Front sites. Using PLF wide throttle is a bit risky, but cherry-picking only extras instead of replacing standard packages as well seems to work well. I've also tacked together a few extras of my own here, but that's a skinny DSL line; please don't melt it down.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
This has been the absolute opposite of my experiance. I've found the fonts on WinXP are either antialiased with colored edges or aliased, and that linux tends to get everything right with the exception of capital letter "o"
I would be really interested in seeing a screenshot or detailed description of what you notice as being craptacular about the fonts.
:wq
Probably preaching to the choir on this one, but if you only use crappy fonts, you will not ever get good results.
:-).
There are plenty of good, free TTFs kicking around, starting with the Microsoft ones (yes Rheba, before they realised that competitors could use them too, the Evil Empire released some of the good things they make, for free. It's difficult to make insecure fonts, but I'm sure they tried
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Good looking fonts is one of the goals of Munjoy Linux.
Set your fonts in X. Use freetype. You have to set fonts in many many places. GTK theme. Qt theme. Xdefaults. Application specific font settings. You have to go through all these places to set the font. Some distros like Fedora Core 2 and the newer Mandrakes I know use a similar font consistently by default in all these places. But if you want consistent fonting your only real option is to go through all these places and change the fonts. It's just a fact of life. If you want the power to have different fonts in different places you have to go to all these places to change the font if you want it to be the same in all places.
I reccoment Bitstream Vera Sans. It is very nice and simple.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Its funny, but there's really only one quality AA font for Linux right now: Bitstream Vera. Sure you can buy others, or loot them from your windows partition, but regardless of your disto the only good free one is Bitstream Vera.
Don't leave home without it.
...it's a GUI toolkit one. Stick to programs from the same UI toolkit--QT4, GTK2, whatever, as long as it's consistent. All programs written with these toolkits will have AA fonts, and use fonts consistently across the entire platform. Also, users will be ever grateful (although they might not know it), since they'll only have to get used to one style of application. It shouldn't be hard to stick to only one toolkit, with a few very minor exceptions.
No comment.
The default fonts look nice, though.
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
If you just need to demonstrate how nice fonts can look in a linux desktop, then you have to most definitely demo Knoppix. This is one of the reasons why Knoppix was developed -- to show off linux with minimal effort. I'm surprised no previous comments about knoppix have been moderated up.
Linux at home
How about this ?
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
You don't know how many times I've sat in front of a user's nice LCD monitor set to a non-optimal resolution with antialiasing OFF!
It frightens me when I go places like Best Buy and the machines are set to weird resolutions. Shouldn't you know how to make a product look good if you're trying to sell it to people?
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
I am not qualified to suggest any distro, as I am still glued to my windowmaker on RH8, while booting up knoppix now and then in vmware, but I can tell you that if you can take the pain of explaining people, the real eye-candy one can have with some effort, I am sure anyone would get convinced.
:p
The biggest turnoff with linux for me till a few years ago, was the non-availability of good looking fonts, which made IE look like a god-send. But with the bitstream-vera and msttcorefonts, anything in X looks just cool. Actually the bitstream-vera fonts themselves'd be sufficient. Setting a single font for different styles might sound awful, but once you get used to the anti-aliasing, everything else'd look like garbage, including the venerable good looking fonts in Windows.
Opera + xterm with anti-aliasing should be sufficient for ppl like me who don't use many other apps, that use mouse a lot.
Damn, just a console with bootsplash installed would be more than enough, to trick people that fonts in linux aren't bad
Grab Mandrake 10, upgrade to the PLF version of freetype2 (extra patented goodness turned on), install the MSFonts and run KDE.
Done.
Oh, and use a CRT for demo's: LCD + NVidia + XFree can take a bit of tweaking to get right.
John.
If you use a Gnome 2 based distro, almost everything will be nicely antialiased.
The distro should also provide OpenOfficeOrg and Mozilla that are compiled with xft.
I use Fedora Core 2, every program has nice fonts.
On a side note, try out Dustismo for a nice text font and Penguin Attack for a nice decorative font. I don't know why distros don't include them. GPL
TrueType font hinting is patented by Apple. To legally use TrueType hinting, you must pay royalties to Apple. This is why fonts look crappy in the free distros. (And no, antialiasing is not a substitute for proper hinting.)
However, I don't know which (if any) pay-ware Linux distros have TrueType font hinting enabled.
By default(no bytecode) freetype does a very bad job at rendering truetype fonts IMHO.
anonymous
I consider the fact that Courier fonts were not used to be pretty good evidence that the documents are not fake. Unless of course, the forgers are from Australia
You even commented on some of the problems.
In Luxi Sans, the w, c, and d all have some unevenness; the e's crossbar is too high.
Trebuchet has dropouts in its e's, and its w is uneven.
Times isn't antialiased at all. Verdana is too thin for its size (and the V is about to fall apart).
The g in Impact is blocky and has some strange lumps.
Georgia almost looks aliased.
Here's a screenshot comparison between your original and the same fonts rendered by MacOS X. (I have most, but not all of the fonts). IMHO, the righthand (MacOS) side looks superior - more like actual typeset text. So what's up? Does freetype suck that badly? Are you using the non-hinted version of freetype? Is this a screen gamma difference? I used Linux/X11/freetype2 daily for a couple of years, and I never got the fonts to look the way I wanted them to. It's almost like the contrast setting is wrong, not to mention the subpixel precision of the glyph control points is out of whack (what's with the V in Verdana, anyway?).
Of course, the flipside is to say that the freetype-rendered text looks crisper, less blurry - especially Impact. I appreciate that distinction - but for me, the consistency of shape and the evenness of the glyph weighting is more important than the apparent focus.
Thanks for the great tip. The Latin-1 glyphs repertoire is obsolete--even popular English-language print publications such as Time and Newsweek have NEVER limited themselves to such a pitiful set of characters.
The full text of a 1980s Time Magazine article ought to be completely and correctly displayable anywhere text is displayed on a 21st Century computer, including the command line. For this, we need fonts such as this Gentium as standard. (Of course, we need UTF-8-based shells as standard, too, among other things, and it's starting to happen....)
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
The _only_ way to get cyrillic letters right is to use MS TrueType fonts. There are very few free fonts but they are either low quality or incomplete (no serbian glyphs in particular). I have fonts.tgz which I untar on every Linux/*BSD computer that I use.
Gentoo is not Debian-based. It's an independent Distribution.
No, I consider it crap font rendering. I've only really use three fonts : Arial, Bitstream Vera Sans, and Courier. You'll notice they look ok :) Anyway I checked and subpixel hinting was off. I turned it on, and Trebuchet and Verdana have improved a bit, but Luxi Sans still has that problem (only at 14pt though, odd).
Anyway, I'm envious of how Georgia looks on OSX (though not for long, I'm getting an iBook), but I don't like the blurriness of Andale Mono. Personally I would like to see screens running at much higher dpi. I tried running my desktop at 1920x1440 once, but there was too much hassle with programs not scaling up. Maybe with all the LCD screens going to 1600x1200 we will see the situation improve.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
Interesting enough, this seems to be solved much better in X than in Windows. All my KDE apps etc. have just normally sized fonts out of the box; whereas in Windows I have to manually adjust many font sizes, and many apps cannot be adjusted at all.
The only problem in X are programs that assume to know how many pixels their text messages use up, with the result of having text boxes etc. in which the text just doesn't fit in at all...
Even if you find good fonts, it still lays them out in massive menus because they haven't been explicitly designed with decent ones in mind.
If you have a look at MS' history, they wrote precious little of their own stuff. People keep lists, but even lots of stuff not on the lists 'coz it's no longer current (e.g. MultiPlan) was not written by them, so I'd be totally unsurprised if they'd got someone else to craft those as well.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I like Mark Simonson's Anonymous font, which is a very nice, fixed width truetype font. You can get it here.
>> You have to set fonts in many many places.
That's the biggest problem with fonts in Linux: Lack of an integrated and unified approach to font and display management. Too many developer egos and way too much NIH syndrome. Everyone does their own thing.
Regardless of the desktop or the window manager you use, you ought to able able to select and manage all your fonts from one single location. Any changes made there should be reflected across your system, in all areas and in all applications.
Today, KDE goes one way, Gnome goes another, openoffice a third way, and almost every other individual application goes its own way. These applications should allow individual customization, but should know and default to the choices you make for the system.
For example, Gnome allows me to select an "application" font. But my selection there isn't reflected in most of the applications I use. KDE takes a similar approach with equally mixed results.
The second biggest problem, not just regarding fonts, is whiney and arrogant developers and wanna-be developers who think Linux is their exclusive property and tell any user who ventures to make a suggestion or raise a criticism to "shut up and start coding". Someone needs to lock these guys in a room.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Just use a shell! Then you'll never have to deal with "fonts", or "graphics"!
Installing Fonts via KDE (at least in SuSE) is easy. In the KDE Control Center, System Administration, Font Installer.
Found this in 10 seconds. Just opened up the SuSE Linux User Guide book that comes in the boxed version, and looked in the Index for Fonts, section installing, and it exaplains where it is.
I just added the fonts I want (in Administrator mode), and activated them. They were then working in all my programs. I now have 1000+ different fonts installed on my system (not that I need that many)
Debian has also a ton of decent fonts (like the MS Core Fonts and the Vera fonts) available as packages.
Try manipulating fontconfig Add the following to ~/.Xresources or/and ~/.Xdefaults Xft.hinting:false Xft.hintstyle:hintnone This should smooth fonts
SuSE 9.1 and the previous versions I've used back to 8.2 have always had great fonts. I use YaST and YOU and am running the 2.6.5 kernel and I must say everything hums along really well. All of the programs in KDE (SuSE's preferred desktop) look beautiful, uniform and work great with eachother.
The fonts are not the issue:
I asked a friend why he disliked Linux:
1) No Start button.
2) Too much "power" (ie, shells).
3)Bad fonts.
4) The only system he had seen was a badly configuired "Whitebox" box.
I have fonts working fine, but i can't get java fonts look right. I'm using blackdown java and fonts look like crap. They are too big and they don't support any special charters. Is there any way to fix that ?
Since you're trying to sway people to linux, Gentoo might be too difficult for them to start on, but setting up fonts is easy. All you have to do is run emerge a few times and it downloads microsoft's corefonts and some other font packages. You may have to add the paths to the xorg.conf file or it does that for you, I don't remember. It's easy to do though.
The fonts on my system look very nice. Since I have a 15 inch laptop screen at 1600x1200 fonts can sometimes be a pain. They looked horrible in Windows XP because I had to increase the default font size and that threw everything off in certain programs. But fonts are really good on my desktop. Sans Serif is a really nice font and I use it all over my desktop.
I had problems with fonts in Mandrake, so that's what I'm comparing it too. Some programs in mandrake didn't look too nice.
...take a quick look at this to see where various distros (including Gentoo) come from. Yes, there are a whole lot (104) of Debian-based distros listed, but Gentoo isn't one of them.
that link should've been this.
LucasFonts (http://www.lucasfonts.com) make some great TTF fonts for use as display fonts - look for their "Office" fonts. TheSansMono Office is the best terminal/vim font bar none. It is _awesome_. But strangely enough, it doesn't seem to be on their pages right now? It probably means they're reworking it, but no matter, just email them and they'll give you a quote, I'm sure...
I'm quite fond of Luxi fonts, among which there is the Luxi Mono, which I perceive as the best-looking monospace font available. I would have posted screenshots if I had a good enough server ;-)
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing