Slashdot Mirror
Prettier Fonts in X?
routecoder asks: "X11 is great, but one of its significant disadvantages is its treatment of fonts. Netscape in X11 is frankly ugly, fonts are chunky, they scale poorly making some sites are hard to read. Are there any good tools available to make X prettier? If not, what would it take to build more asthetically pleasing font support?" This has always been one of the largest complaints about X11 that I've heard from many Microsoft supporters. Is XFree86 v4 going to address any of these issues? How substantial would changes need to be to make font support in X comparable to or better than that which is in Windows.
Rather than download a self-extracting exe, you can FTP and get loads in .ttf or .fon format. See http://ftpsearch.lycos.com/ and search for "Fonts".
I downloaded 1,500 fonts from somewhere on that list (I think that was my search term...)
I've just been point to a URL by a friend: .zip format, but none of them is fonts found as standard in Windows. Maybe a friend running windows could extract it for you?
http://www.fontfreak.com
It has fonts in
In an email conversation which followed the last Slashdot discussion about adding antialiased font support to X, I came up with the following [probably unoriginal] idea:
Why not create a hand-antialiased font by building it up out of multiple standard monochrome BDF fonts, which you overlay in the same location using different colors (greys)?
For instance, to get a simple antialiased "a":
BDF 1, drawn with color black:
. # # # . .
. . . . #
. # # . #
# . . #
. # # . #
BDF 2, drawn with color 50% grey:
# . . . # . . .
. . . .
# . . #
. . . . #
# . . #
The combined output:
x # # # x
. . . . #
x # # x #
# . . # x
x # # x #
The advantage of this is that it can be done entirely with the existing font drawing mechanism (just invoked multiple times).
Think this'll fly?
Div.
But my grandest creation, as history will tell,
But my grandest creation, as history will tell,
Was Firefrorefiddle, the Fiend of the Fell.