Arch Linux

cschep

Member

Registered: 2006-12-02

Posts: 125

Website

Fonts?

What do you guys do right off the bat on a new install as far as setting up your fonts?

Mine seem to always be ugly, just looking for a pointer or two.

cschep

Member

Registered: 2006-12-02

Posts: 125

Website

Re: Fonts?

oh, and I'm using Xfce4 right now, but it happens to me in most WM/DE setups.

matahari

Member

From: Bandung, Indonesia

Registered: 2007-04-04

Posts: 59

Re: Fonts?

/me using xfce too
i follow this http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/XOr … figuration and this http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xorg7 wikis. the only problem i'v got is when setting up correct dpi for my monitor (google solve this though)...

Weeks

Member

Registered: 2006-01-26

Posts: 91

Re: Fonts?

I downgraded my freefont2 to the one on the 7.2 CD. The fonts are great now. I've placed freetype2 in the IgnorePackage section in pacman.conf. I have to use pacman -Sd on packages that require freetype2 so pacman doesn't upgrade me back to 2.3.

freefont2.3 seems to have messed up the bytecode interpreter. If you want to stay up-to-date, you can use the autohinter instead of the default bytecoder interpreter and things are better, satisfactory really. There's a section on enabling the autohinter in those links matahari posted.

(I'm not sure if I'm imaging it but when libxfont was upgraded I noticed a quality improvement - I'm using freetype2.2. I'm probably imaging it.)

Misfit138

Misfit Emeritus

From: USA

Registered: 2006-11-27

Posts: 4,189

Re: Fonts?

The only thing I ever did was pacman -Sy ttf-ms-fonts
They look great.

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cschep

Member

Registered: 2006-12-02

Posts: 125

Website

Re: Fonts?

Thanks for the thoughts guys. I installed gnome and i'm really enjoying the way it looks. I also installed ttf-ms-fonts and that really helps. When I get home from work I'm going to look into what version of freetype I have as well, I think I'll probably try that downgrade situation.

Thanks! arch community r0x.

JGC

Developer

Registered: 2003-12-03

Posts: 1,664

Re: Fonts?

If you're looking for problems, then downgrade freetype2. The recent 2.3.3 package has some security updates not present in older releases, and I'm sure 2.3.1 had some aswell.
Since our distro uses freetype 2.3.x, all packages that can utilize features from this version will actually use it (pango for example), so after a while, your system will stop working with new packages.

cschep

Member

Registered: 2006-12-02

Posts: 125

Website

Re: Fonts?

Thanks for the advice.

I messed with the hinting and things seem ok now.