🚀 go-pugleaf

Stephen Reynolds wrote:
> 
> Why do the fonts in some applications display so poorly when running
> X? In particular I'm referring to the fonts in Netscape, WordPerfect
> and similar X apps. Some menus are all but unreadable and the small
> fonts in the Netscape email client are awful. While Terminal apps like
> Pine and MC display fonts well in xterm.
> 
> This isn't a problem with a particular machine, it seems to be a
> common problem on all the machines that I've installed RedHat linux
> on.

The short answer is that xterm uses a bitmap font designed to be
displayed on 75dpi monitors -- if you send this to a printer
the result is terrible.

Netscape and other programs use scalable fonts (usually in the
Adobe type 1 format) to implement WYSIWYG.  Depending on the font, 
it may or may not display cleanly.  The same font from other
manufacturers may be better or worse: as a general rule you
get what you pay for.

Type 1 fonts were designed for printing, not high quality display
on low quality screens.  The Apple/Microsoft Truetype fonts were
designed for this, and you can use Truetype fonts with xfsft
(X font server, free type).

Steps to improving font quality:

 0) Check the font path.  The order should be:
        75dpi:unscaled
        Type1
        75dpi  (ie: scaled bitmap fonts)

 1) Increase the screen resolution sufficiently to run
    100dpi fonts as default rather than 75dpi fonts.
    You need about 1280x1024.  Unless you have a card
    with about 8MB of video RAM, you will need to drop
    colours to do this.

 2) Install xfsft.  Put the TTF fonts in the font path
    just before the Type1 fonts.

 3) Get the free TrueType fonts from the Microsoft web site.
    Get the Bakoma TTF fonts if you look at a lot of TeX-
    documents (eg: maths and physics papers).

 4) Pay Adobe for their "Fonts for the web" (?) pack.  These
    are the traditional PostScript fonts, but with better
    on-screen display.

Even so, the results aren't as good as WinNT on the same machine.

I think the fragmentation of font handling has a lot to do with
this -- because X has such a limited set of fonts, each software
vendor ships their product with its own fonts.  And these may
or may not work well.  The Windows approach of a single set of
fonts (which can then be optimised for display) is superior.

The main reason for this fragmentation seems to be the very
long delay in implementing WYSIWYG printing in X, and thus
forcing each vendor to reinvent the wheel.  (IMHO, the whole
UNIX printing facility is stuck in the '60s and sux badly.)
Hopefully the KDE/Gnome projects will fix the WYSIWYG printing
facilities and the IPP protocol will force a revamp of the
UNIX print spooling system.

Cheers,
Glen