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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.
Yes. Yes they do.
Go compare RedHat to Gentoo to Knoppix to Mandrake.
It's only an insult if it's not true.
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!
Why not just try a live CD for a few days? Slax, Knoppix, PCLinuxOS, MandrakeMove, etc. will all give you an idea of what it will be like.
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
> I am of the opinion that linux is ugly, ...
Try 2.6.9-pre1. It is much prettier.
Ask yourself two questions:
If you're happy with your current software then don't bother. If you're unhappy with your current software then tell us what you dislike and we can tell you if Linux is better or worse.
Also bear in mind that Linux was weak areas (eg, games, off-the-shelf software). If any of those weak areas are relevant to you then don't bother.
If you're simply curious then try one of the many Live CDs (eg, Suse, Knoppix). Minimal fuss and you get a roughly accurate Linux experience.
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
freudian slip, i'm afraid. i didn't mean it. really. :P
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
But some make it easier than others; We run RH9 at work and I think it (mostly) looks great. It's also quite easy to install true-type fonts on RedHat.
There are RPMS available here to allow installing the MS core fonts (Arial, Comic, etc).
Most Windows users seem to miss a few of the MS fonts, and are infinitely happier when they are available and configured for use.
Nearly all of the applications use the KDE font settings and anti-aliassed fonts. It's only the few older apps that don't get used anyway that seem to screw it up.
I drink to make other people interesting!
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.
I kinda tend to side with you: although distro maintainers do put a lot of work into making sure Freetype is working properly across the board (this involves checking the Big Two toolkits, Qt and GTK+, and their companion desktop environments, KDE, GNOME, and XFCE, as well as OpenOffice and Mozilla, who dance to the beat of their own drums as far as fonts are concerned), every distro provides pretty darn similar software, and as long as you know what you're doing, you can get software from whatever distro working okay.
On that note, I would recommend just going with one desktop environment and one toolkit for the most part; this will make changing font settings for (almost) all programs a one-step task. I believe KDE was the pioneer in bringing things like antialiasing and subpixel decimation (for LCD monitors) to the desktop in an easy-to-control, one-step way, but GNOME is just as easily customiseable now (if not more so -- but I have no idea; I haven't used KDE for a while). From my experience (in Gentoo, at least) the GNOME control panel also changes font default and aliasing settings for Firefox, but OpenOffice is a hit-and-miss affair. Anyway, I stick with GTK+ programs for the most part, so one change in the GNOME control panel and all my programs have a fresh font.
For a really lovely serif font, try Gentium. It has almost every glyph under the sun, in one attractive style. Unfortunately, this comprehensiveness also has a drawback -- they haven't managed to design bold and italic alternates yet. But if you want to show off the international support of Linux to all your Russian, Greek, and Jewish friends, Gentium is the font for you.
Sorry, I get a little starry-eyed about fonts. It's the graphic designer in me.
Standing at the very edge of my imagination, I peered into the inky void and realised -- I couldn't think up a new sig.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
Unfortunately for the most part you are right. People who antialias everything should be shot.
One of the first things I do on any fresh install is alter the fonts.conf to only antialias below 8 and above 14pt, and to always antialias italic or bold text. Everything else is not. Then I grab the standard MS fontpack and use those fonts, although bitstream is slowling coming over. A lot of work was put into the MS fontpack (I think it was monotype who did it actually) to make the hinting right.
OH yes, and then I spend an hour screwing around with the latest freetype to turn ON the bytecode interpreter and disable autohinting because, no matter what they say, I think that the autohinter's output looks like pure ass.
I like Mark Simonson's Anonymous font, which is a very nice, fixed width truetype font. You can get it here.
Try manipulating fontconfig Add the following to ~/.Xresources or/and ~/.Xdefaults Xft.hinting:false Xft.hintstyle:hintnone This should smooth fonts
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 ?