Fonts Kopete, Firefox, gaim, ect...
 

Little by little I am getting the desktop just the way I would like it, so far my desktop I find to be very sharp and clean for the most part. I still am having a few minor problems with fonts. I am still trying to understand how apps gather the fonts they use, but the main applications I am referring to at the moment are

Kopete:

Kopete seems to grab the font that is displayed that you are using for your fonts > desktop font. When I change the font within Kopete it goes right back to what I have the desktop font set as. Can anyone help with this or know the proper steps to take to fix that or change that.

On a side note: Can you send msg's in Kopete by hitting enter rather then Alt+N?

FireFox

FireFox seems to have ill fonts, it's hard to explain but it as if someone drew them with a bleeding ink pen, every few mm a bleed. I made some changes to the font setting that at first I thought made it better but then after looking at some screen shots and browsing the web a bit in Konqueror it's far from what I would like it to be. Any idea on how to fix this. Konqueror looks very clean and sharp, but it lacks support for a few websites I use.

gaim

gaim is just a mess font wise, same bleeding problem but unlike Kopete nothing I change changes the fonts or appearance of gaim.

I figure it may have something to do with gnome? Or something with external program config files, just a guess. If anyone has any tips, points, or way to fix these problems please let me know! It's one of the last thing I have to figure out to have everything just the way I would like it. Thanks in advance, Michael J.

Hi there JaySuSE!

The very first thing I always do when setting up a Linux box is to install .ttf fonts. Firefox is the absolutely ugliest application that runs with the default fonts. Take a look into this tutorial for a font de-uglification :). I used it for Slackware, but should work with any distribution out there I guess:

http://brendan.sdf-eu.org/articles/a...sing_slack.php

Slackware 9.1 or higher comes with an empty folder at "/usr/X11/lib/fonts/TTF". If you have a Windows box somewhere and if you copy all your .ttf fonts from C:\Windows\Fonts to /usr/X11/lib/fonts/TTF, the programs should pick it up. You may also need to add the path to your TTF fonts under your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. The path is already included for Slackware 9.1 or higher.

Set Firefox with the following under the preferences field (Edit >> preferences >> fonts and color under firefox. The path may be slightly different though):

Proportional: serif
Serif: Times New Roman
Sans-Serif: arial
monospace: currier new

It should all look sharp now. The reason because Kopete changes the default font when you change the desktop font is because they are both qt applications, so they change according to the "theme" you are using.

Gaim and Firefox are GTK. Not sure if installing .ttf fonts would help gaim's appearence, but you bet Firefox will look neat.

Good luck!

Great! Thanks a lot Megman X, I will check out all of that information tomorrow or the day after I hope. I hope to post some screen shots of what I have put together also for my desktop, it's very sharp and clean blows any winbox I have seen out of the water.

That Kopete thing is a problem, because I have my font set at 7 so the default for Kopete is so small, and not being able to hit enter and send a msg is driving me nuts it's like old ICQ!

Michael J

Seem to have everything looking better, it's just the gtk apps that really destroy the look of the desktop lol. Is there a tool of some sort to adjust all the gtk app fonts?

You are most welcome mate :). About your question about gtk app fonts, that's a hard one, ghehe. I know that if you are actually running Gnome, you have the option to use anti-aliasing. Gnome runs a daemon called "gnome-settings-daemon" to keep up the anti aliasing and other font properties, overriding your "/home/user/.gtkrc-2.0" file.

Since you are not running Gnome (thus not running that daemon) you may try to manually edit your hidden file located at your "/home/user/.gtkrc-2.0". If that file does not exist, create it manually (type "touch .gtkrc-2.0 at your /home/user) then edit it. Add or substitute the following line:

gtk-font-name = "Arial 14"

That will tell gtk to use Arial size 14 to all GTK applications. Any valid .ttf font should work, as "Times New Roman 14" etc as long as you've them installed as I suggested in my previous post. Keep in mind that this is for gtk2 applications, gtk1 applications read the file "/home/user/.gtkrc" instead.

Well, as you see, getting the desktop to look good is quite a challenge :).

Good luck!