Hi,

After a day of running Mandriva Linux, everything's cool except the fonts. They're incredibly ugly when viewed with antialiasing off. Take a look at these screenshots:

fly.srk.fer.hr/~ddjuric/temp/ugly1.png
fly.srk.fer.hr/~ddjuric/temp/ugly2.png
(Sorry, can't post direct URLs since this is my first post here!)

This is the case with most that I have installed. From what I've read, this is a common issue and can be fixed with making modifications to FreeType. Now, I did these modifications - I think (being a total Linux newbie). What I did was unpack the package into /usr/local/src, edited out that header file, and ran the "make" command twice, as said in the readme. After about a minute of compiling, everything was okay - except the fonts, of course.

I've only installed one Windows font, Tahoma. For this, I used the KDE Control Center. Unfortunately, it's ugly just like most other fonts.

fly.srk.fer.hr/~ddjuric/temp/ugly3.png

The only ones that look "normal" are Fixed and Terminal.

What can I do? Can my graphics card have anything to do with this? I have an ATI Radeon.

I have the same problem (also running a radeon). It doesn't seem to matter what program you are running, but often looks worse using Firefox. I'll have a whole page of typing where all the 'm' characters look like an 'n' with an 'r' stuck to the side of it.

MS fonts will look good if antialiasing is enabled in your font settings in kcontrol. As for making non aliased fonts look good, there is a thread about this somewhere on this site so do a search.

This was the best I could find for make my Mandiva 2005 LE fonts better:
http://avi.alkalay.net/linux/docs/font-howto/Font.html

Yes, the fonts are quite ugly, but it is possible to make them look pretty good. Have a look at mine to inspire you

http://www.electra.pwp.blueyonder.co...nuxdesktop.jpg

You appear to be using Fixed font or similar. Fixed font looks good on mine desktop as well. However, I spend a lot of time surfing the Web, and no web page uses Fixed fonts. Instead, they use Verdana, Arial, etc... which are just too damn ugly.

They look ok too http://www.electra.pwp.blueyonder.co...uxdesktop2.jpg

I cant remember exactly what i did to improve the fonts it was a while ago, it was replacing the font renderer freetype2 i think, and getting the MS Fonts, I do use fixed fonts where possible tho

Look at my Mandriva 2006 beta screenshots. Screenshot1 and screenshot2 are using Verdana as the default font.

Did you just install MS fonts or did you do something extra? Can you take some shots with antialiasing off?

Can my problem be related to having an ATI card?

Have a look in this thread:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=291039

Antialiasing is on. They don't look very good when its off.