slackware 10: fonts suck

does anyone know anything about fonts in slackware 10, and why they are so cruddy looking? the Xorg/X11 system is really screwing things up for me it seems, and whereas with slack 9.1 i just installed xfree86 4.4 and that solved everything, that doesn't work for slack 10. in fact it makes things worse.

i read every font deuglification guide i could find, most of which are horribly outdated referring to redhat 6 and 7, etc. and went through step by step (as well as i could follow the disorganized documentation) making sure all my font paths were there (they are), changing my dpi setting (didn't help, changed it back), setting hinting to full, and so on. nothing seems to address the main issue of the "spindly" fonts.

x.org has no documentation on making fonts readable that i could find, and the whole thing is also very confusing with x11, freetype, fontconfig, xft, etc. are all those things included with X11 or not? if not, why not? can someone explain to me exactly what i need other than what comes with slackware 10?

i don't understand why after 10 versions, slackware can't have usable fonts out of the box. everyone is likely to need the same basic setup, so what is the big problem with making a generally usable default? slackware is so awesome otherwise, why can't that one thing be addressed and improved on? it's only like THE most important aspect of using a desktop computer, you'd think more attention would be paid to having that work. i just think it's really strange that something would be released that really isn't ready to use at default settings.

anyway, rant aside, is there an "all-in-one" guide somewhere that explains how to configure fonts and X server step by step, without jumping all over the place -- first talking about font servers, then freetype, then Xft, then mentioning anti-aliasing without telling how to do it unless you're running KDE and can just check the stupid box? i installed dropline-gnome to see if that would help, and that didn't either. i'm totally stumped. ANY help appreciated. thanks.

I just have dropline-gnome installed and use the bitstream vera sans fonts. They are absolutly beautiful and I believe much better looking than windows xp fonts. Do you have your xorg config setup for anti aliasing? This could help.
Check for these lines to turn it on:

Section "Module"
    Load        "dbe"
    SubSection  "extmod"
      Option    "omit xfree86-dga"
    EndSubSection
    Load        "type1"
    Load        "speedo"
    Load        "freetype"
    Load       "glx"
    Load       "dri"
EndSection

Make sure the part where load freetype,speedo,type1 are not commented out.

I just installed Slack 10 and the fonts look the best they've ever looked in Slackware for me. In fact, they look better than those of any other Linux distro I've tried. It must be some kind of configuration problem. Wish I knew more about fonts and could give you the solution you seek...

i have always used the bitstream vera fonts with no problem, and i liked them better than anything else in windows or linux, also. they always worked fine for me even without dropline and looked great. yes, i had all those options selected in xorg.conf/xf86config (with xtt commented out, which i believe it should be), so the issue appears to be somewhere else. even the menus in xfce4 and in my apps look horrible, and i don't think those use bitstream vera by default but probably sans or luxi sans. ?

Originally posted by Ozar I just installed Slack 10 and the fonts look the best they've ever looked in Slackware for me. In fact, they look better than those of any other Linux distro I've tried. It must be some kind of configuration problem. Wish I knew more about fonts and could give you the solution you seek...

how can that be? i did a full install on a clean partition and configured nothing (meaning it looks bad even at the default configuration). i even moved my home directory and made a new one so no old settings would cause a problem, just moving directories from the old /home into the new as needed. did you do a full install? what desktop are you using? (probably KDE, i'm guessing)

Did you do a fresh install or upgrade from 9.x to 10?

I tried to update from 9.1 to current a few days ago (just before v10 was released), and had all kinds of headaches with X after that. One of the problems was that shared libraries weren't found, although they were in the places X expects: The error messages I got told me that library such-and-such wasn't found at path here-or-there. But it was there. The usual tricks like running ldconfig didn't help. And even removing and re-installing couldn't fix the problem.

What I want to say: It is apparently far from easy to "upgrade" from XFree86 to Xorg. It may well be that some piece of configuration is left from your previous X installation that points to a wrong place (eg, to a font path that no longer exists). Check the font paths in your config file, and check if you really have installed all the font packages coming with X. Eg there's a package with fonts optimised for screen display --- maybe this is missing on your system. And, as Ozar said, check your settings for anti-aliasing (in your desktop environment configuration, like KDE).

It is, of course, possible that XFree86 is better in some details than Xorg, but I doubt that this is your problem. Because I did two fresh installs of Slack 10 in the meantime, and all is well with fonts on both systems. I can confirm Ozar's observation: Fonts have never looked better on any Linux I know, at least in KDE, but that's actually thanks to the fact, that the KDE version that comes with Slackware is very up-do-date.

My suggestion: Try to de-install all of X. If you used swaret to install/upgrade, do both
- removepkg
- swaret --remove
and search for any files belonging to X left on your harddisc after that. Remove them (rm).
Only when you are sure, nothing is left of your X system, re-install Xorg.

Good luck!

gargamel

Originally posted by synaptical how can that be? i did a full install on a clean partition and configured nothing (meaning it looks bad even at the default configuration). i even moved my home directory and made a new one so no old settings would cause a problem, just moving directories from the old /home into the new as needed. did you do a full install? what desktop are you using? (probably KDE, i'm guessing)

Moving directories... Are you sure that you didn't move any old hidden files and hidden directories, like .kde?

gargamel

I recompiled Freetype2 to enable hinting and sucked the fonts off a M$ office cd and everything looks fine.

1. i did a completely fresh install from the slackware 10 discs on a formatted partition. no remnant of any OS was left on the partition, and nothing was upgraded. a pure stock install.

2. slack 10 CDs were md5sum checked in K3B.

3. i only moved files from /home/user.sav (old home directory) to a fresh /home/user directory after making the new user. the only files i moved were things like directories of downloaded programs, my text folder, and so on. no hidden . files were moved back.

4. i installed freetype 2.1.9, but that broke some of my applications like gimp, which said something about it being compiled for an older version of fontconfig, or that maybe there was a duplicate fontconfig.so.1 file or something (don't remember the exact message). but it sucked. and fonts still looked horrible, although i didn't use the hinting flag. that sounds like that might work, but then gimp will break again so i don't want to risk it (and why should i have to install that? i never did before).

5. i don't use KDE, i use XFCE4.

6. i just wiped the partition again and installed slackware 9.1. everything looks great. the only reason i upgraded is because 9.1 only has gimp 1.2, and when i try to upgrade it to 2, it breaks, along with a host of other things like gedit, epiphany, galeon, and other gtk+stuff. but i might just leave 9.1 and deal with the old version. it's really frustrating, i will tell you that much, because at one time i *did* have gimp 2.0pre1 on 9.1, upgraded from swaret, and everything was working great. now suddenly everything is just blowing up. i really don't get it.

>edit: now i'm upgrading the stock 9.1 install (except with 2.6.7 kernel) to slackware 10 with swaret ( ). i'll see what that does, as XFree didn't look like it would be upgraded to x11, so maybe it will give me slack 10 with the old xfree. if it doesn't work, i'll remove xfree with swaret, and then install 4.4 from the source files. and if *that* still doesn't work, i'll just reinstall 9.1 and leave it until slack 11 comes out. freaking linux though really it seems that 90% of linux problems are really X/GUI problems (X, gtk, etc.)

okay, well nothing's working. i'm going back to 9.1. if things get too outdated before the next slack release i guess i will just have to switch to debian. thanks for the suggestions.

Setting Up Fonts in Slackware Linux

1. Install Slackware
2. Copy any extra TrueType fonts to /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF
3. Install latest version of Freetype
a. decompress the archive
b. Open the file "include/freetype/config/ftoption.h"
locate a line that says:
#undef TT_CONFIG_OPTION_BYTECODE_INTERPRETER
change it to:
#define TT_CONFIG_OPTION_BYTECODE_INTERPRETER
c. configure, make, make install
4. Update font metrics
It is important to do this now that you have Freetype installed. I run this from a script, as root.

#! /bin/sh

/usr/X11R6/bin/mkfontscale /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF/
/usr/X11R6/bin/mkfontdir /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF/
/usr/X11R6/bin/mkfontdir -e /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/encodings
/usr/X11/bin/fc-cache

5. Turn on anti-aliasing but limit the range. I think it works best to have it turned off for small fonts, except italics.
Here is my copy of ~/.fonts.conf

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
<match target="font" >
<test compare="more" name="size" qual="any" >
<double>6</double>
</test>
<test compare="less" name="size" qual="any" >
<double>14</double>
</test>
<edit mode="assign" name="antialias" >
<bool>false</bool>
</edit>
</match>
<match target="font" >
<test compare="more" name="pixelsize" qual="any" >
<double>6</double>
</test>
<test compare="less" name="pixelsize" qual="any" >
<double>15</double>
</test>
<edit mode="assign" name="antialias" >
<bool>false</bool>
</edit>
</match>
<match target="font" >
<test compare="eq" name="slant" >
<const>italic</const>
</test>
<edit mode="assign" name="antialias" >
<bool>true</bool>
</edit>
</match>
<dir>~/.fonts</dir>
<match target="font" >
<edit mode="assign" name="rgba" >
<const>rgb</const>
</edit>
</match>
</fontconfig>

thanks coffee drinker -- been there, done that.

one thing i recall however, is that in my ftoption.h file, the line was already set for define. it was commented out with a */ though (or was it /* ?) so i just removed that on both ends. didn't help, though. font config looks good, and i also ran ttmkfdir before doing the mkfont commands and fc-cache -f.

i wonder if it's because i have an LCD? although that really shouldn't matter once the sub-pixel rendering is set up, and so on. plus, once again, i have to go back to the fact that 9.1 looks beautful on the same exact hardware, with basically the same XF86Config/xorg.conf font settings.

i think the x.org version of X is fooked.

do your fonts just lok ugly in everything? or just certian Xwin managers? you mentioned dropline gnome,and KDE... have you tried any others?

is it all fonts in Xwindows or those running in certian application windows? What is the resolution set to on your LCD (yeah LCD's set outside of their good range make fonts look extra poopie...hah....I said poopie).

If you're in KDE, did you turn on font anti-aliasing in the controll panel doohicky?

no, as i said i'm not in KDE, i use XFCE4. i did try gnome, and that looked bad, too. i installed freetype again and ran the script, it looked 10x worse. i removed x11 and reinstalled from swaret 10.0, it didn't help. i removed xfce and installed from source, it didn't help. i removed mozilla and installed the Xft enabled version, didn't help. it's almost like Xft isn't working. xdpyinfo |grep RENDER returns just RENDER. shouldn't there be other info along with that?

i installed slackware 9.1, upgraded the kernel, and everything looked great. i upgraded xfce 3.99 to 4.0.4 and mozilla 1.4 to 1.7, which i have done a dozen times before (i've basically got it down to a science: full install, upgrade kernel, reboot, install swaret, remove xfree86, install xfree86 4.4 from source, upgrade xfce4 and mozilla, and everything's fine). this time, though:

mozilla wouldn't launch after i upgraded -- just nothing happened at all, nothing. i mean from console, type: mozilla, and it goes to the next line with *nothing.* no error messages or anything. like it didn't exist, except no error messages. it's like the freaking twilight zone, i'm not kidding.
galeon wouldn't launch -- set MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME directory
epiphany wouldn't launch -- set MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME directory
etc.

i upgraded those apps with swaret to match mozilla, and then NOTHING would launch -- gedit, galeon, epiphany, gimp, gnumeric, nothing -- every time it kept complaining about a "relocation error," gdk_threads_something or other. gtk+2.2 to gtk+2.4 breaks the whole gui system.

so now i'm back in 10, and it's just not happening. slackware 9.1 worked at one point, so i will try that one more time. if it wacks out again with the mozilla b.s., i'm going to install debian and trash these slackware cds. it's really making me ill. a stock install should work without needing major customizations and extra software. w-t-f ?!?!?