Apparently I'm quite useless.

I've done all steps franklin has suggested.

When I look through my Xorg.0.log file it shows that it's loading freetype from /usr/X11R6

This is obviously incorrect as I compiled freetype into /usr/lib

Perhaps Xorg comes with it's own version of freetype?

I changed the symlink in X11R6 to point to the proper one in /usr/lib hopeing that would fix things.

Xorg.0.log now shows:

(EE) LoadModule: Module freetype does not have a freetypeModuleData data object.(II) UnloadModule: "freetype"
(II) Unloading /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/fonts/libfreetype.so
(EE) Failed to load module "freetype" (invalid module, 0)

On a side note, after completing Franklin's steps xfsinfo no longer works, neither does xselfont.

I've commented out unix:/7100 from xorg.conf and made sure to complete all the obvious other steps.

I'm still dealing with antialiased blurry fonts. many hours into this, anyone able to offer some suggestions?

Edit:

here's my about:buildconfig from firefox

Configure arguments
--disable-ldap --disable-mailnews --enable-extensions=cookie,xml-rpc,xmlextras,pref,transformiix,universalchardet,webservices,inspector,gnomevfs,negotiateauth --enable-crypto --disable-composer --enable-single-profile --disable-profilesharing --with-system-jpeg --with-system-zlib --with-system-png --with-pthreads --disable-tests --disable-debug --disable-jsd --disable-installer '--enable-optimize=-Os -g -pipe -m32 -march=i386 -mtune=pentium4' --enable-xft --enable-xinerama --enable-default-toolkit=gtk2 --enable-official-branding --disable-xprint --disable-strip --enable-pango

After following Frank's HOWTO and hint on OpenOffice, I still cannot make OpenOffice fonts look readable.

I have Verdana 7 on all (most of) my applications (GTK2 mainly). OpenOffice only fails to comply. Antialiased fonts are OK, but it becomes horribly slow - almost unusable - for my machine. Thus, I disabled the anti-aliasing in OpenOffice. I enabled system fonts for user interface.

So, the result is that OpenOffice 2.0 has menus and toolbars with normal, desktop-wide fonts. They look quite acceptable, as in any other program. But the actual text (the text to be edited) looks bad. Exactly as their entire help stuff. It gave the same results before recompiling freetype. I have the feeling that it does font renderring itself, without BYTE_CODE_INTERPRETER.

My question: how can I make OpenOffice comply with the system/desktop-wide settings and use BYTE_CODE_INTERPRETER for rendering fonts?

yes it does, and this is supposed to solve it:
LD_PRELOAD="/usr/lib/libfreetype.so" sofice

but it doesn't in my case

Thanks.

Where did you take this information from? What file are we talking about? Maybe I'll track this down.

OK. I run soffice under the required environment,

env LD_PRELOAD="/usr/lib/libfreetype.so" sofice

But it didn't work. I'll look later at the links you provided.

I found it on this forum in some other thread, here:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...libfreetype.so

sofice is a file that contains script to run OpenOffice, and you can type
LD_PRELO... directly in shell or put it in some script.

here is also some info :
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/archive/.../t-185129.html


there are some patches for OOo, I'm not sure if they are related to this problem:

http://cvs.pld.org.pl/SOURCES/openof...freetype.patch
(dynamic linking mentioned)

http://freetype.org/freetype2/patche...e-patches.html

However, I have extremely rarely successfully compiled app from sources, and never applied patches. (Guess patches require source and cannot be used on .deb package?) and OpenOffice is probably going to give some error when compiling, not for beginner like me.

From the last link you provided, this problem is supposed to be fixed with OOo 2.0.3. Don't try to compile. I really doubt it would. However, never tried. Anyway, you'd need about 4-6 GB of spare space.

--update: I have just checked OOo 2.0.3. No word about libfreetype in the ChangeLog. Maybe in 2.0.4?

Hi Franklin, there go your screenshots:

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /vze8992v/ on this server.



Can you repair that?

In case I have not said so before, I use your HowTo since I don't know when and have it even copied to my "manual" for re-installations. So: Thank you.