Hey all, I'm new here. I suppose I should mention although I'm a pretty much complete newbie in Linux and in everything other than MS software, I would like to learn all there is to it about this nice operating system.

My problem is that nearly all fonts in every application just look plain ugly -- too small to even read properly and also with jagged edges.

So I've spent hours and hours googling and looking through all kinds of tutorials and guides, but still haven't managed to get my fonts to look good enough. Because I don't yet have much technical knowledge about Linux, I picked this simple tutorial in an attempt to fix my fonts:

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/Font-HOWTO/

This is what I did: I opened up the Mandriva Control Center. From there I selected "System" --> "Manage, add and remove fonts. Import Windows Fonts" --> "Get Windows Fonts". I chose this way, because it seemed to be the easiest one from that tutorial. After installing the Windows fonts, I typed "kcontrol" to the command line and configured my fonts exacly like there. Then I logged off, rebooted and instead of looking like those fonts on the screenshots in that tutorial, they actually looked even worse than before!

I'll post some screenshots:

http://xs64.xs.to/pics/06032/badlookingfonts1.png
http://xs64.xs.to/pics/06032/badlookingfonts2.png
http://xs64.xs.to/pics/06032/badlookingfonts3.png
http://xs64.xs.to/pics/06032/badlookingfonts4.png
http://xs64.xs.to/pics/06033/badlookingfonts5.png


I haven't got a clue what might cause the fonts looking like this. They appear so small and streched together by some reason. Perhaps some font rendering engine fails to render the fonts or something like that? I have tried applying the default settings, logging off, rebooting and the re-applying those in that tutorial, but no luck.

My monitor is LG FB700, and I use the ATi Radeon 9600Pro graphics card (for which I haven't already managed to install the drivers, could that have something to do with it?).

Any kind of help would be highly appreciated.

/Edit: fixed a typo.

Gee, I found the easy solution is to install;

msfonts-1.2.1-4tex.noarch.rpm
msfonts-style-1.2.1-4tex.noarch.rpm

Easy solution to install? Well, could you explain it a little bit better, please?

You mean I should install those *.rpm packages you mentioned? I tried that, but there's still no difference. The fonts still look as bad as they did before. =\

wow, 8 is quite small, looking at your second image. Try out my settings, they are default and look the same to me as the default Windows XP.
http://img33.imageshack.us/img33/595...ltfonts4hi.png

Thanks for the reply, Lakota! These settings in your image look pretty good. I'll stick with those until I can get this font problem solved somehow.

I don't know but if you look at my screenshots in the first post, you could assume Linux isn't applying those fonts in the first place. It looks like as it is using some other fonts instead, but showing "Tahoma" and "Trebuchet MS" in the font properties. Or is it just me?