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Updated And Unified Font HOWTO

Posted by timothy on from the glypical-user-interface dept.

avibrazil writes "A new Linux Font HOWTO was published with way more practical info for modern systems. The still-useful parts of the two former Font HOWTOs from TLDP were unified in this new one, to be a definitive one-stop-shop for Linux font solutions."

4 of 29 comments (clear)

  1. Fonts will always confuse me on linux by drakethegreat · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The reason for this seems to root from the fact that gnome for example attempts to create standards across the system for applications to use in their framework and then applications try to allow you to modify the fonts in them seperately. Then you have multiple ways to adjust fonts system wide as well. I think that a lot of work is still needed with Linux and fonts. Its something (and one of the only things) that Windows and MacOS do better. Its still something that is easily tolerable.

  2. The article in two words... by Ma�djeurtam · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ...install Microsoft core fonts or your desktop will look ugly.

    Of course, the legality of installing Microsoft fonts if you haven't a Windows license is doubtful.

    I'm surprised that there aren't successful attempts at designing MS compatible fonts. What would it take? It sure would help Free Software desktops if there was a free (speech) version of Arial, Verdana and friends available. Why wouldn't the open source model work for fonts design?

    --
    Instant Karma's gonna get you, Gonna knock you right on the head (John Lennon, 1970)
    1. Re:The article in two words... by coaxial · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I really think that we (slashdotters) should launch a project aiming at redesigning Tahoma, Georgia, Verdana, Mono, Comic, Courier New, Impact, Arial, Arial Black, Lucida and Trebuchet. It wouldn't be exactly the same fonts, but their properties (size, spacing, kerning) and looks would be equivalents to those they clone, so that interchanging them with MS's ones wouldn't break any documents / web pages.

      *gasp*

      Didn't you read the HOWTO!?!? That would be wrong! That would be creating a "ripoff"! We're all supposed to create brand new fonts from all original ideas by copying Guttenberg's interchangeable typefaces, not by copying some font that costs $100 for plain text, and then another $100 for bold, and italics. Bold-italics for $150. That's a savings of 25% over buying a bold and italic individually! WOW! What a deal! But what ever we should do, we shouldn't buy cheap fonts. That's wrong. ("Southern Software, Inc [...] but don't buy any of their fonts!")

  3. Re:...I think the way I made it work was by setagllib · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It's fatally exaggerated. Even without KDE's tools the worst you have to do in a sufficiently convenient distribution (Gentoo, for instance) is copy the fonts to the right directory and 'ttmkfdir', then xset fp rehash or restart the server. If the directory is specified in xorg.conf it's done.

    Unified smoothing is another story (but GTK2/Xft just do it for you by default) but not much harder. Still something I never bothered with because us old-fashioned developer types find that extended sessions of smoothed fonts messes with the mind. At the very least, my aMSN, aterm and nedit should never have any smoothing at all. Does KDE's option force all things to smooth or what?

    --
    Sam ty sig.