Thats waaaay cool.....
]]>Mines set at 85 maybe I should try 132 ??
]]>i tried nptl and it didn't improve my fonts, and then my system broke uninstalling it. what could it be in nptl that would even remotely affect the fonts? glibc?
]]>I'm not sure if just installing nptl will "fix" your fonts but if you see anything relating to nptl and fonts I'd like to see it. In my quest to reverse the problem, I tried changing pango, gtk, freetype, glibc+nptl and kernel headders to the latest cvs versions and nothing.
]]>I don't know what it is with the fonts now. But I think it's not arch related problem only because I could find a lot of complaints about fonts after upgrades to latest versions of x and other font related packages (like some slackware 10 users on linuxquestions).They also tried everything you did and even more but without any success.
BTW I also remember that fonts looked different a few months ago in arch - they looked exactly as in your "perfect" font rendering screenshot IMO.
so then i wonder what happened?
i'm really surprised that more people don't seem to be upset -- or even very concerned -- with this situation. i came to linux for a lot of reasons, one of which is that it's just better than windows. but now in this respect it's not. so that kind of sucks.
that slack 10 user might have been me. but yeah, i am not saying it is only arch. slack is a packaged distro, too. i'm just wondering if something changed in x or freetype that now requires packages to be built with specific flags for freetype/Xft that they didn't need before. ? or is it a gtk+ problem, or what? very frustrating.
]]>BTW I also remember that fonts looked different a few months ago in arch - they looked exactly as in your "perfect" font rendering screenshot IMO.
]]>[3] sero:/var/log $ cat Xorg.0.log |grep -ir freetype
(II) LoadModule: "freetype"
(II) Loading /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/fonts/libfreetype.so
(II) Module freetype: vendor="X.Org Foundation & the After X-TT Project"
(II) Loading font FreeType
[4] sero:/var/log $
okay, everything's there. but here's with "load freetype" commented out:
[1] sero:/var/log $ cat Xorg.0.log |grep -ir freetype
[2] sero:/var/log $
nothing there, but no difference in font rendering whatsoever. so it seems freetype is not being implemented properly, even when it does load. does that mean the arch packages are not built with the proper flags to allow for freetype/Xft? i don't know what else to conclude.
]]>(II) LoadModule: "freetype"
(II) Loading /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/fonts/libfreetype.a
(II) Module freetype: vendor="The XFree86 Project & the After X-TT Project"
compiled for 4.4.0, module version = 2.1.0
Module class: XFree86 Font Renderer
ABI class: XFree86 Font Renderer, version 0.4
(II) Loading font FreeType
first i went to the /usr/include directory and changed freetype to freetype.sus and freetype2 to freetype2.sus. i restarted X, and it made no difference at all.
next i removed freetype1 with pacman, just to see what would happen. nothing! i reinstalled it just for kicks.
then i figured i would just cut it off at the source completely. i commented out the load freetype line in xorg.conf and restarted X. again, no difference.
after renaming the freetype directories in /usr/include, i built freetype2 from source, but they didn't get installed again in /usr/include. so i'm not sure where they are, or where they're supposed to be, or what.
the main question is how come commenting out the load freetype line in xorg.config doesn't do anything? if freetype is responsible for the rendering, i would think things would look quite different without it. but maybe not?
:?:
]]>I agree with everything you're saying slackhack.
I think that fonts did look more like your slackware screenshots some time ago in arch, but I can't really say when it changed.
The problem with fonts though is sometimes you don't know when you're mind is playing tricks with you - so what I just said could just be fantasy.
i don't think so, because the proof is right there in the links. and don't get me wrong -- i'm not saying it's specifically an arch problem -- i just happen to have that distro installed. slack 10 looks exactly the same as the arch examples. and it has nothing to do that i can tell with local.conf, dpi, xfce hinting settings, etc. -- all the usual suspects. none of that works.
there must have been some change in recent freetypes, fontconfigs, X, etc., or more likely the relationship between all of them (or between those things and something else like gcc or glib or gtk-2-4, or whatever), giving many if not most of us lousy fonts. we can "get by" with the bitstreams, but just barely. any other TT fonts are basically unusable, ime.
the sad part is, after seeing a lot of the screenshots coming out now on different forums, it seems that most people are not even aware that somehow we have gotten stuck using substandard fonts. when i first started using linux with MDK9, RH9, slackware 9, etc. the fonts looked so good i couldn't believe it. i had never seen computer fonts look so good. i cringed everytime i had to go back into windows because it really looked bad.
now it seems that we have lost that, but i am going to press this issue as much as i can with whatever developers will listen (or care), so that we can break out of this "bad font" cycle before it gets too locked in and entrenched. and then hopefully we can get good fonts back again before i totally lose it.
]]>I think that fonts did look more like your slackware screenshots some time ago in arch, but I can't really say when it changed.
The problem with fonts though is sometimes you don't know when you're mind is playing tricks with you - so what I just said could just be fantasy.
]]>here are the comparisons of how fonts generally *should* look, and how they are looking lately with the new fontconfig, freetype, X perhaps, and the new distribution versions (arch 0.6, slack 9.1/10, etc.).
bitstream slack
bistream - arch
i'm not saying i want to use luxi sans on everything, but you can clearly see that something is wrong. even though they're ugly in the good version, they're still usable. and look at how there are big chunks missing out of the verdana fonts. it's just not right.
the shots of the good fonts are from slackware 9.1, but only after i compile XFree86 from source *over* an existing version (XFree86 4.3 from swaret, in this case). if i don't install a binary first and just compile the 4.4 source, it also looks like h3ll. that procedure doesn't work for arch or slack 10, though, too bad. and btw, in the compiled version the bytcode interpreter is not uncommented, because that's the way i did it before finding out about that flag, and i wanted to do it exactly the same way. if it were uncommented, the slack fonts would probably look even better.
so what is going on? same hardware, same X config files, same /etc/local.conf -- same everything. i do not get it. i think i'm going to pose this to the freetype or fontconfig developers and try to get an answer from them. the new way the fonts are rendering is just really unacceptable, imo. for the first time in a year i'm ready to go back to freaking windoze! :evil: (okay, not really <shudder> - had to give that a minute to pass. )
]]>meanwhile, still trying to find out how to get X to use the antialiased fonts instead of the spindly bitmaps. anyone?
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