RedHat Font Engine
 

Here's a question that I think a lot of people might like answered.

I'm currently running Mandrake 9.0 with KDE 3.1 (compiled from source tarballs). What I would love to have is the font engine that's available on RedHat 8.0, as well as some of the fonts that it uses.

Can anyone help me figure out which libraries to download and possibly compile that could give Mandrake 9.0 the ability to render its fonts as nicely as RedHat does? I'm willing to modify source code and recompile, if necessary.

Thanks in advance.

It's handled by XFree86, a google for xft should provide some hits.

System wide fonts are quite tricky, as we're transitioning between two font systems. Red Hat uses some custom hacks to Qt for instance to make it use fontconfig.

In general I'd wait until Mandrake provide an update. If you must tweak, then you want to install and setup fontconfig, update Qt, use GTK2.2, ensure XRender is up to date, use the latest FreeType and compile mozilla with xft2.

You don't actually need to update your X server however.

Thanks for the advice. I'll try it out.