Optimal Use of Fonts on Linux. Optimal Use of Fonts on Linux. Copyright . Introduction. You can have the coolest desktop widget theme, the most enlightened colors combination, and a very nice background wallpaper. Your desktop still won't look professional, clean, beautiful, and most important, comfortable, without good fonts. It is a common sense nowadays that good fonts are a key element for good desktop usability, because we use to spend hours per day in front of computers, writing documents, dealing with huge spreadsheets, making presentations, browsing and chatting. So we are all the day reading text. The font subsystem on Linux evolved a lot in the last years, from an old naming, handling and option of fonts, to the support of True Type, Bistream Vera, etc. As of release time of Fedora Core 2, components like Xft, Free. Type and Font. Config, and higher level software usage of them has stabilized and is now considered mature. But Linux still has issues with optimal font rendering, most of them related to software patents that we describe in Section 2 below. Why Fonts on Linux Aren't Straight Forward ? Jump to Section 3 if you just want to fix your desktop fonts fast. Read this section if you are interested in the details on how and why make it. Fonts are used on the screen and for printing. These medias differ a lot in DPI resolution: screens have 7. DPI, while modern printers use to have 3. DPI. So low- resolution medias as the screen need better font rendering algorithms to workaround the media's limitations. To get optimal fonts on the screen you need: Good fonts designed for low resolution media. True Type font technology evolved to be the best thing you can get nowadays. But for optimal screen beauty, you also need fonts that were designed for this purpose. We found that Tahoma and Verdana are the best fonts you can get for the screen. A good font renderer. Even more ยป Account Options. Sign in; Search settings. A resource about Unicode and UTF-8 on Unix and Linux systems. Changes from 1.2 to 1.3/2.0. How do I install PyGTK-2 and PyGTK-0 side by side in the same system? What are the major changes in PyGTK-2 for GTK+ 2.2? Ham Radio Software on Centos Linux - Configuring multitudes of Amateur / HAM Radio software for Centos6 / Centos5 Linux. Current Linux distributions include the excelent and very mature Free. Type font renderer library. A . ttf file contains information to draw the characters at any size, so you eventually can convert a text into a scalable outline drawing (built from line segments and quadratic bezier arcs) with tools like Open. Office. org or Corel. Draw. Font drawing algorithms are extremely complex because they have to decide which pixels to highlight based on the mathematical equations inside the . When you need text in big sizes like 4. And these use to be the text size for KDE and Gnome widgets, text for web browsing, and almost everything else we see on the screen. To solve this problem more efficiently, beside of the mathematical equations inside a . This process is called grid- fitting or hinting. The point is: the technologies to interpret this hinting information are patented by Apple, and they are commonly called True Type Byte Code Interpreters (or simply BCI in our document, from now on). With reverse engineering, the Freetype Project has implemented a byte code interpreter, but due to legal issues in some countries, some Linux distributions disable it at compilation and packaging time. This is a list of distributions that are known to enable or disable BCI. Please send us updates. Table 1. Free. Type Bytecode Interpreter Status per Distribution. Support. No Native Support. Conectiva. Mandrake. Gentoo. Red Hat, Fedora. SUSE Free. Type tries to workaround this legal issues developing autohinting algorithms, but in our tests, BCI algorithms gave us much better font rendering results on the screen. X. org Font Subsystems. At the present time, X. XFree. 86 use two font subsystems, each with different characteristics: The original (1. Fonts rendered by this subsystem are not anti- aliased, are handled by the X server, and have names like: -misc- fixed- medium- r- normal- -1. The newer font subsystem is known as . Fontconfig is often used along with the Xft library, which allows applications to render fontconfig fonts to the screen with antialiasing. Fontconfig uses more human- friendly names like: Luxi Sans- 1. Over time, fontconfig/Xft will replace the core X font subsystem. At the present time, applications using the Qt 3 or GTK 2 toolkits (which would include KDE and GNOME applications) use the fontconfig and Xft font subsystem; most everything else uses the core X fonts. In the future, Linux distributions may support only fontconfig/Xft in place of the XFS font server as the default local font access method. The Easy Steps to Enlighten Your Desktop. You'll have to: Update the Free. Type library package on your system with one compiled with BCI support. Install the Webcore Fonts package (a. Microsoft fonts). Follow the instructions below on how to configure your desktop and common applications. Get a Better Free. Type RPMFree. Type compiled with BCI presented much better screen font rendering results. Get RPMs for your distribution here: If you use one of these distributions, but on a platform that binary RPMs are not being provided, you can easily compile your own (even if you don't have any software compilation skills) following the instructions on Appendix B. WE WILL ACCEPT CONTRIBUTIONS of distribution specific Free. Type repackaging, so if you can contact us, we appreciate. If you are interested in repackaging your own Free. Type, see how we repackage the Fedora Core and Red Hat RPMs with BCI on the Appendix A as a reference. Configure Your Desktop. General Guidelines. The main idea is to use good hinted fonts all around. As a general rule, we'll use Tahoma 8pt for desktop widgets, Lucida. Typewriter 8pt for monospace text, and Verdana 8pt, 9pt or 1. These are the default font sizes on a Microsoft Windows desktop, and they look good on a 1. If you have a better screen resolution (1. We choose these fonts, specially Microsoft's Tahoma and Verdana, because they look perfect at small sizes (8pt, due to their excellent hinting), providing a more efficient screen utilization. They'll make your desktop look beautiful, professional, clean and comfortable. These fonts were designed for this purpose. For window titles or text that will appear in bigger sizes, you may choose whatever you want because bigger sizes hinting are not so relevant. A Note About Anti- Aliasing. Anti- Aliasing is a technique used to reduce the . It is also used to blur the imperfections of bad hinted fonts at small sizes. For desktop widgets (usually with small size), some people think it makes the desktop look dirty. So a practical conclusion we found is to use Anti- Aliasing for sizes bigger than 1. Anti- Aliasing. Currently the best hinted fonts you can find, as we cited before, are the ones found in the Webcore font package. KDETo configure KDE, use the Control Center (kcontrol in the command line). This is how I have it configured. Figure 1. General KDE font configuration. So we basically chose Trebuchet 1. Lucida. Typewriter 8pt for fixed size text, and Tahoma 8pt for everything else, which includes menus, buttons, etc. The 2 first should follow your taste, but Tahoma 8pt for all the rest is the optimal configuration, also used by MS Windows 2. XP. One other thing to note is that I disabled anti- aliasing for font sizes up to 9 points. Look at the entire dialog and see how all text is clearly rendered, looks clean precise and professional. Konqueror (KDE's browser and file manager) also needs font configuration for beautiful web browsing and file management. Konqueror File Management font configuration. We used the same Tahoma 8pt for rendering the list of files in Konqueror's window, because Tahoma was simply designed with this purpose in mind, with 8pt being its most important size, with no need of anti- aliasing to be clear and beautiful. Figure 3. Konqueror Web Browsing font configuration. And this is finally for web browsing. We are using Verdana as the general font because it was simply designed for the purpose of fluent text reading on the screen. And the old Lucida. Typewriter when a web page requested a fixed size font. Some may choose fonts like Courier or Bistream Vera Mono here. We left all other fonts blank, to let the page choose it. But you may use Times New Roman as the Serif Font. Read more about serif fonts in Section 7. The sizes of the fonts for browsing are a bit personal and depends on how healthy are your eyes, and the resolution of your screen. In my 1. 02. 4x. 76. I use default size as 8pt, and I don't want web pages to use sizes smaller than 7pt. In the end of the day, to set the size is not so effective because modern web pages use to set them with absolute values. So it is more practical to use the browsers menu to . This is a quite complex subject that deserves an entire HOWTO, but it is generally OK to leave it as the Language Encoding. You may need to change it if you frequently browse pages with non pure ASCII (international text) made by irresponsible webmasters that still don't use UTF- 8 for the web. But here also it may be more practical to use the menu to set the encoding for the current page you are browsing. Gnome. We'll use our generic rules here too: Tahoma 8pt for everything. Navigate preferences menu to invoke the following dialog or just run gnome- font- properties from the command line. Figure 4. Gnome Font Configurations. Open. Office. org. As of Fedora Core 3 time, Open. Office. org 1. 1. KDE and Gnome. This means that your environment should tell OOo how to use widget fonts. But we found it didn't really work. With further investigation we found that only the non- AA configuration we made was not propagated to OOo. So we used OOo's own dialogs to change it. Figure 5. Open. Office. KDE themes etc. So we basically selected , menu, and in the View section we enable OOo to do anti- aliasing at font sizes beginning with 1. Tahoma 8pt. 3. 2. Mozilla Firefox. Mozilla Firefox follows the same Konqueror rules. Figure 6. Firefox fonts for web browsing. So we - > and then Fonts & Colors, and selected Verdana 1. Lucida. Typewriter 1. Firefox is a Gnome application, so it will use Gnome's font settings for widgets.
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