Distro font rendering

zack6901 · 10-30-2006, 07:23 AM

In my travels I,ve noticed that there are a lot of distros that have crappy font rendering. I've made it a priority to base my decision on which distro I choose on how fonts are rendered. In your opinion, which distros present their fonts best? I'm running pclinuxos right now and its pretty good for what I do, but I still want to check out more if there are any.

uselpa · 10-30-2006, 09:10 AM

Depends on what you like.

I personally like the Windows-type fonts: MS fonts, no anti-aliasing, with the byte-code interpreter enabled. You can look at this to see what I mean (screenshots are at the bottom). Other people find these fonts crappy and love anti-aliasing, which I find fuzzy and unreadable.

Basically you can tweak every distro so that it looks the way you like. First find out what you like, then we can help you either to find the distro that has it out of the box, or how to tweak.

zack6901 · 10-30-2006, 09:17 AM

Well the ms true type fonts are what I look for, but not necessary. Smooth and not choppy fonts is what
I look for. "Smoothing the edges of screen fonts" is what its called in windoze. Some of the distros I've tried included:mandriva,fc6 and pclinuxos that do this very well. I just wanted to know if there are more distros from smaller developers that are along the before-mentioned lines.

uselpa · 10-30-2006, 09:23 AM

"smoothing the edges" is anti-aliasing, and that's what most distros do (and I don't like). Then it also depends on the quality of fonts included.

I would suggest going to osdir and having a look at the distros you're interested in. If your distro is not there, google for screenshots. That way you know exactly what it will look like by default.

And remember, you can turn any distro the way you like (with more or less work involved).