I've been having trouble getting antialiased fonts working well in Slackware 9.0 and KDE. The default antialiased fonts looked awful, so I installed the MS corefonts (just copied the .ttf files from a CD backup I'd made and rebooted), and downloaded, compiled and installed freetype 2.1.5 with the bytecode interpreter enabled. I installed the latter twice, once with the default /usr prefix and the second time with the /usr/X11R6 prefix as recommended in this article. In XF86Config, the lines for freetype and xtt and both uncommented.

I think the fonts are looking marginally better, especially the MS ones, but they are still look kind of blurry and faded and aren't nearly as clear and bold as the equivalent on Mandrake 9.1. I'm mainly interested in Luxi Sans and Luxi Mono (my favourites) and it almost looks like they are different versions to the Mandrake ones. Some of the spacing between the letters is uneven, and some letters have uneven bold areas.

I've read that Dropline Gnome solves the Slackware fonts issue but I'd rather not download it all, plus I mostly use Fluxbox with KDE apps.

Can anyone give me any pointers as to how to improve the quality of the fonts so that they look as good as on Mandrake? Are the Luxi* fonts the same as the Mandrake 9.1 versions? Has anyone else had this problem, and would it be solved by just getting Slack 9.1? TIA!

One thing to keep in mind is that the fontserver will search through the list of font paths in your XF86Config file only until it finds one that matches the (possibly ambiguous) criteria of a given X client. In other words, you may want to change the order of the font paths, moving the TrueType fonts nearer to the top of the list.

Check the Font De-Uglification How-To for more info.

Enjoy!
--- Cerbere