Ciprian Popovici wrote:
>On Thu, 10 Feb 2005 19:25:57 -0500 cga <cga2001@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
>>What I meant was that the extra features provided by fontconfig (aa..
>>auto-hinting..) add more variables to the text rendering equation and it
>>has now become almost impossible to tweak fonts w/o access to an
>>interactive tool such as the one provided by the gnome & kde desktops.
>>
>>
>
>It's really not that bad.
>
You're quite right. Once you know what can be done on your hardware and
how to do it it's not that hard even without interactive feedback.
otoh.. when I first saw the Window Maker that resulted from my Debian
install and compared it to what I normally use.. I was in shock.. Giant
leap backward was my first reaction.
The problem is that I knew little about fonts and next to nothing about
recent developments in the font rendering area. I could not find any
high-level introductory document - most of what I know about fonts in X
is from the O'Reilly manuals that date back to the late 1980's.. last
revised in 1993.. so I had to learn all this from the ground up.. bits
and pieces I found online.. obsolete howto's.. README files.. man
pages.. comments in config files..
Maybe I should have concerned myself more with just the looks of my
fonts and concluded that since my older system's fonts looked perfectly
clean on this hardware the newer one could be persuaded to look likewise.
That would probably have been my approach if I had been upgrading from
Woody to Sarge - eg.
But because I was switching from RedHat to Debian at the same time I was
upgrading to a more current version of X I was not able to think about
this in a completely rational way. My reaction was a bit along the
lines.. "now because of this stupid anti-aliasing crap they have broken
X badly.. and I'm not going to be able to do anything about it.."
Initially of course.. Then I progressed to ".. now that AA is
fashionable.. politically correct.. they've made it almost impossible to
get rid of it without making lots of changes that will probably ruin my
Debian installation for good".. And since I know so little about
Debian.. since I did not know how/where to make the changes.. and
naturally being very slow finding how to make changes in an environment
I was not familiar with.. not to mention that I was worrying all the
time that I could not even half guess at the implications of what I was
changing and hence was probably going to break something..
Well sure enough.. after all the tampering and contortions, everything
GTK is broken in subtle ways and the gnome desktop in not-so-subtle
ways. I've removed and reinstalled gnome a couple of times to no or
little effect and I am now thinking of removing XFree86 completely and
starting over.
> I don't have the full Gnome, just the lib
>packages needed to make GTK apps work.
>
yes.. that was plan 'A'. :-)
>I have KDE because it's monolitic
>and you get everything anyway.
>
about 300Meg of stuff that I'm never going to use.
>So I didn't do anything with Gnome, except edit my ~/.gtkrc-2.0 and
>~/.gtkrc and specify the font I want (my favorite is also Verdana):
>
># gtk 2 - ~/.gtkrc-2.0
>style "default" { font_name = "Verdana 10" }
># gtk 1 - ~/.gtkrc
>style "default" { font = "-*-verdana-medium-r-*-*-12-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-2" }
>
>
I tried this but for somereason I never got it to work. Maybe there were
problems with the syntax and I didn't look for possible error messages
in the right places.. Or maybe it clashed with something else in my
setup. I'll give this method another shot after I've cleaned up GTK+..
Another method when the gnome desktop is installed is to start the
gnome-settings-daemon when you start you X session. You can even do it
on the fly - ig. from the command line.. So I've added it to my Window
Maker autostart file. But since gnome on this system is damaged it has
some rather unpleasant side-effects.
>For KDE I ran kcontrol, went to font settings, chose Verdana all over the
>place, checked "use antialiasing" and chose a range to exclude.
>
>Here's my ~/.fonts.conf. It will tweak various hinting and anti-aliasing
>global values, as well as DPI. It will disable anti-aliasing betwen 9-16
>pixels and 8-14 points. Adjust as needed.
>
Pretty much what I did. Everything KDE looks good. So before I remove
KDE I must remember to save the kderc (?) files in a safe place.
>After you do the above, the only place you need to keep up anymore is just
>~/.fonts.conf. You can do interesting stuff, like adjust your DPI, tweak
>fonts individually or alias ugly fonts to good looking ones.
>
I'll look into this. A very good opportunity to learn about the xml way
of doing things.
Thanks much for comments.
