Ambrose Li wrote: >I share the same feelings. It took me *days* > you must've cheated.. like working full-time.. round-the clock.. or something.. It's already taken me *weeks* and I'm far from done.. :-) >to figure out >how to configure fontconfig when I was forced to switch over. >Before I figured out that things could be tweaked (and how to >tweak them), I was actually complaining that fonts had become >much uglier than before. > That was my exact first reaction.. Rather than constantly rebooting I run my Debian desktop(s) chrooted on another vt.. so I was able to make instant comparisons either by switching vt's or via screenshots.. When I first took a look at the X that Debian installed I thought.. Hmm.. looks like there's some tweaking needs to be done.. But I *never* imagined that it would take me close to a month to achieve results that are yet not quite as neat as what I see in my old environment. And mind you, apart from switching my default variable font from helvetica to verdana in a few places I never really bothered tweaking that environment at all. Provided I used small fonts and stayed away from the printing-oriented stuff like dvi or gv everything looked just about as clean and legible as in Windows. >Of course, now I'm ok with fontconfig... :-) > Since it was one of the major changes with recent XFree86 versions .. my first reaction was t think that fontconfig was to blame. Then I re-read the fontconfig documentation more carefully and I realized that my problem had nothing to do with fontconfig per se.. As an end-user trying to customize my desktop I had no business directly dealing with fontconfig.. Instead I should consider using dpkg-reconfigure or the KDE/gnome configuration tools to set my aliasing/hinting preferences. >But on a Debian system there is the extra variable of defoma >too: good for prepackaged fonts, but a real hassle for self- >installed fonts. > Since I'm switching to Debian (trying to switch to Debian would be somewhat more accurate at this point..) .. where this little fellow comes into the picture is yet another mystery... Seems de-fo-ma does for Debian system administrators what fontconfig does for application developers.. provide a centralized control point for everything font-wise. Thanks much for your comments.. The other gentleman's remarks gave me the impression that everything was working perfectly for everybody so it's nice to know that someone else saw what I had seen.. and thereafter spent a sizeable amount of time fixing the problem.
