Hello

I use the ms corefonts with slackware. On the display they look as they should do (with bytecode interpreter enabled in freetype). However, when I print a document written with say TimesNewRoman fonts from kword, the result is rather ugly (compared to the same document printed with ms word via wine). The letters are too near to each other. I tried different settings in cups (quality, resolution, paper size), with no success. Please help.

Something you need to understand about fonts -- whether they're TrueType or Adobe PostScript Type1 -- is that they should be installed in a standard place so that they're available to applications (not the other way around). In a Linux system (and many Unix-like systems as well), that's in a subdirectory in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts; in your case, possibly named /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF and, after you've copied the '.ttf' files into that directory, and you've executed the mkfontdir and mkfontscale utilities in the directory to create the two index files needed. Both the copying and utilities should be done by root (or su, or whatever you prefer).

You do not need to specify any arguments to the utilities; just

cd /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF
mkfontdir
mkfontscale

You need to edit the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf, adding a line

FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF/"

in the Files section of xorg.conf, then stop and restart the X server (so it will create entries in /etc/fonts) for your additional font path (the font path will now include /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF, and applications will "know" where to find the TrueType font files you added).

After you've done the above (don't forget to stop and restart the X server), you'll probably have better luck with your browser display, word processing display and printed output.

Have a VERY close look at the characters to see if they are the font that you expect. Font substitution always messes up printing

Thanks for the answers. I installed the fonts according to the common how-tos for this task. As I said, the only problem is printing the windows fonts (@davidsrsb: yes, the characters are the fonts as I expected, but the overall appearance of the printed document is ugly due to the messed-up distances between the characters). Applications (whether they are qt or gtk-based) all look fine with the fonts. Could the /etc/fonts/fonts.conf file have any effect on printing the fonts?

Messed up spacing means a kerning problem

I'm using Slackware 10.2 with kernel 2.16.27. Which kernel parameters could affect printing?