I had planned on doing a updated version of my post "Beautiful fonts in slackware 12.1" but its looking like all the info and patches still apply to 12.2 so I don't think there is a need, but maybe...
However though I have been meaning to do a post on how to achieve the best traditional looking fonts since some people prefer the crispness of the way they look and do not like the "fuzzy" look sub-pixel rendering and anti aliasing can cause. Unlike sub-pixel rendering which can take sometime to properly setup, setting up traditional non-AA fonts is quite easy and can be done in about 10 minutes and I HIGHLY recommend doing this if you hvae a CRT.
DISCLAIMER!! The reason that the following information is not already built into Slackware or a lot of other distributions is because the technology used is patented by apple. By using it you should have permission by apple or live in a country where the patent doesn't apply, ok enough of that lets get started.
1) The first thing to do is we need to recompile the freetype package so that it will render fonts using the bytecode interpreter instead of the patent free autohinter that is used by default. Pat has already done all the work for us, his build script has all the patches and the bult script its self only requires changing one line to "turn on " the bytecode interpreter during compile. look for the following line and change it accordingly.
#zcat $CWD/freetype.bytecode.interpreter.diff.gz | patch -p1 --verbose || exit 1
change to
zcat $CWD/freetype.bytecode.interpreter.diff.gz | patch -p1 --verbose || exit 1
compile and upgrade the package and you are done with the first step. Also if you don't want to compile yourself feel free to use my package located here.
http://webpages.charter.net/daedra/1...3.7-i486-2.tgz
2) You need to set your font DPI to the correct setting for your monitor or to what ever your preference is. Windows uses 96x96 be default and I think that is a good standard for CRT monitors but if you want change it to something different or get more technical about this go to this post its more detailed than anything I am prepared to write
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...s-in-x-462034/. However if you have a nvidia card and are using there drivers they should automatically set your DPI for you, I don't know why this works it just does. To check your DPI in a terminal type xdpyinfo | grep resolution
3) Now that you have the freetype package setup and your DPI set properly the next step is to get some high quality fonts. In order for the bytecode interpreter to work it need fonts with bytecode information to "interpret". This is debatable but the windows core fonts, at least to me, are the best suited for this and should be used. To get the windows core fonts can copy them from your windows partition if you are dual booting or you can get them from alien bob's website at
http://www.slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/corefonts/. the easiest way to make the fonts available after you get them is to copy the fonts to /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF then run fc-cache and you should be good to go. You may have to restart X but I don't think you need to.
4) The last step is setting the fonts in various applications. To make firefox look like it does in windows you need to go to preferences/content/advanced and set your fonts to look like this
http://webpages.charter.net/daedra/12.1/firefox.png now that firefox is setup you need to change the fonts for all kde apps, to do this open control center, go to the fonts section and you can change the fonts accordingly to your own preferences just so long as your using any microsoft core font you should get great results. also under the advanced tab you can tweak the settings, I personally turned on anti-aliasing for any fonts over 11pt in size, here is a screenshot of my settings
http://webpages.charter.net/daedra/12.2/settings.jpg. Now we need to set the gtk default font to a windows core font, to do this fire up kedit and add this line
gtk-font-name = "Arial 10" save the file in your home directory naming it .gtkrc-2.0 and your done. Keep in mind it doesn't have to be Arial thats just what I use.
Well if you have done everything correctly you should be all finished here are some screenshots to see what you can except the fonts to look like.
http://webpages.charter.net/daedra/12.2/noaalinux.jpg
http://webpages.charter.net/daedra/12.2/noaalinux2.jpg
http://webpages.charter.net/daedra/12.2/noaalinux3.jpg
here are the same screens in windows
http://webpages.charter.net/daedra/12.2/noaawin.JPG
http://webpages.charter.net/daedra/12.2/noaawin2.JPG
P.S. If I missed anything or if anyone has any hints or tweaks for better results please let us know.