Dear lads & gals (& retro hipsters too),

I have a cosmetic/readability problem with the default fonts in KDE4, that comes with Slackware 14.2 stable.
I'm looking for a font that is similar to the default system font used in Windows 95&up, called Tahoma. Not a Redmond fan myself, but I give them (or the UI designers) credit for some (few) good things, this Tahoma font being one of them. Whenever I'm forced to use Windows (7/8/10) I'm installing/using this Tahoma font as the system default and I don't use any anti-aliasing on it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tahoma_(typeface)

Now I'm not that much experienced with X & DEs (including KDE) but I looked over the fence at some other *nix distros and I kinda liked the better readable/not that condensed fonts they use. I don't know where to look after the default system font used in those distros (different DEs) and hope that some of you more experienced can help me with some hints about what similar fonts I could try, or better, maybe how to install the Tahoma font itself, if that would be even possible. Apart from the default system font in KDE4, I also have a very big and very old problem about how Firefox is displaying both menus and content(text).

I uploaded some relevant screenshots - for full quality 1:1 download the original png file (click on DOWNLOAD), zippyshare will display a distorted JPG file.

- my actual (default) KDE font settings: KDE4-Font-Settings.png
https://www81.zippyshare.com/v/LYuBmk6s/file.html
- how Tahoma looks in Windows 7 as system font and how Firefox is displaying pages - This is what I'd like to achieve/to be used as reference: Redmond-Tahoma-Firefox.png
https://www22.zippyshare.com/v/EoLLDxkA/file.html
- what I don't like ATM and would like to improve: Slackware-KDE4-Firefox.png
https://www17.zippyshare.com/v/AU0EPuxO/file.html

I'm using only Intel display adapters (embedded) that come with Haswell/Broadwell/Skylake and my monitors are all 16:9, if this is even relevant.

Many thanks in advance!

I don't have time for a long detailed post, but for improved don't rendering, check out this page:

http://duganchen.ca/writings/slackware/fonts/

As for fonts, I like to use Noto Sans for most GUI stuff. I don't know how it compares to Tahoma.

1 members found this post helpful.

I use Noto Sans too, there's a LOT of variants to choose, Noto Sans UI and Noto Sans Mono for terminals and browser bbcode.
It's very similar to 'droid' from android2 and 'roboto' which was my favorite.

To answer some of this; you could put *.ttf in /usr/share/fonts/TTF and run fc-cache.
Sometimes there's a DPI mismatch so the fonts look really bad, X defaults to 96 but if you dig up monitor specs and find precise monitor DPI you could start X with -dpi switch
For XDM the minimal Xservers file would look something like this:
Another thing, on win32+cleartype it'll look a bit cleaner because there's depth of 32 while you may have depth of 24 under Xorg.. (I don't think 32 is fully supported yet)
About the FF problem, I assume it's GTK+3 and their incompatible standards. It's probably fixable by CSS theme or GNOME tools, but I don't really know for sure. Not using FF or GTK+3.

1 members found this post helpful.

@montagdude & @elcore

Thank you both for the hints! I had no experience with fonts operations, never cared about until now (my eyes are hurting when using the default DE settings) and what I got now in the posts above is sufficient to start my work on improving my DE experience. Not sure I'll achieve that much with the content displayed in Firefox, as it requires different fonts and I don't want to copy over all TTF files from a Redmond system, I'm OK with Tahoma (or Wine Tahoma Regular and Wine Tahoma Bold) only. The DE fonts however look pretty easy to add/tune.
I'm fine with all the help received and I'll put this thread on resolved. Thanks again for the quick responses and the intro for hacking the DE

I think I have tried it all to make Firefox easy on my old eyes. You want to know what finally worked? Not Firefox. Not Chromium. Not Vivaldi.

Google-Chrome is the only browser I can stand to look at in Linux. Wish this was not the case but I am not lying

Thanks for the tip Gordie. I'm focusing on Firefox ATM, Google Chrome/Chromium are not alternatives for me, they're both already part of Skynet

Perhaps webcore-fonts would help?

1 members found this post helpful.

Thank you very much for the link, really useful to have everything in one package. For my personal needs I can use the Redmond fonts (I bought several Windows licenses, involuntarily...) but for business use I considered something GPL, Wine is LGPL.
DE looks good with the Wine Tahoma fonts:
https://github.com/kode54/wine/tree/master/fonts

About Firefox, already did some progress with the default fonts (fallback). I'm banning web fonts and design primitives - bullets, icons, etc, as they're also a form of hidden tracking and mostly pointing at google. I'm not recommending this, because without the images/icons some pages are having incomplete menus and I need to guess what's the link behind the empty image placeholder. Well, privacy requires sacrifices.
Interesting study on web fonts:
https://www.keycdn.com/blog/web-font-performance/