I'm trying to get the fonts to look better on my Fedora 2/Gnome system. I want the "crisp" font look that XP has. I would like to have fonts without "font smoothing" or "anti-aliasing" but when I turn it off everything looks like crap.


Things I've tried:

1. Turned off "anti aliasing" by selecting monochrome in font preferences. (made everything even look worse.)

2. Downloaded and installed True Type fonts.


I would really like to get all the M$ software off my system but I can't commit to Linux until I get this font issue worked out.

Does anyone have a suggestion on how to improve the font looks?

Thanks in advance for your reply.

Why are you against anti-aliasing?
It's sort of the holy grail of getting fonts to look good.

You've got a few options.

There are some great open source fonts out there, but a lot of people are quite against reinventing the wheel. Why create new screen-quality fonts if they're already out there? That's one question I see come up fairly often.

Bitstream has some nice fonts; they're included with Slackware by default. You can use them with any distro, though.

Another option would be to import your MS fonts from your windows partition. It's quite easy and there are a lot of tutorials on LQ about it as well

--Shade

"Why are you against anti-aliasing?" -- it makes the fonts slightly-blurry and semi-bold.

I've tried the bitstream.... I will try to MS fonts import next.

thanks.

is the byte-code interpreter activated on fedora? If the MS fonts look crap without antialiasing, it probably isn't. There might be freetype packages for fedore with the byte-code interpreter enabled. If not, you can re-compile freetype2 yourself. It's not a big deal; just look thru the documentation to find out what to do.

In my case I discovered that if I added 100DPI fonts everything was perfect. Of course the use of 100DPI fonts depends on your monitor resolution (mine is 1240x1024). Hope that helps.
John

I've made some progress...

When I used a "fixed" font... everything looks decent. So I'm thinking that the fonts are not scaling well. Now I just need to find some decent "fixed" fonts.

I'll try the 100DPI fonts. my resolution is 1024x768. I will also try to recompile freetype.

Sincethe monitor resolution is high then I'm (fairly ) sure the 100DPI will improve things. You should google the problem because I recall I had to change the X config files to insure 100DPI was used first rather than the 75DPI stuff.