Talk:Optimal Use of MS TrueType Core Fonts for a KDE Desktop on SuSE

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Just one question... Why Tahoma font does not render like the other fonts? Arial, Verdana, Palatino, Times all looks great except Tahoma. On the other hand, Tahoma looks very nice with the rest of the programs as well as KDE. Any tip to use Tahoma in OpenOffice?

-- Noelamac, 2006/08/27

Great document. I will add your hints to my SUPER iso. Keep up the good work. Looking forward to all the other apps to look as I like them and as you write it down ;)

Andreas

Awesome. I got fonts working really well in Firefox with the help of this. I second the motion of this making it into SUPER. --Madmatt04 13:41, 31 Aug 2005 (MDT)

Whaoh, I've discovered the discussion page on the WIKI.

Thanks for your congratulations.

Very nice to heard the stuf will be in SUPER but how will you do ? Can you directly include MS TT Core Fonts ? Is it free ?

Else, for Tahoma, you won't have the right do to so I think but if you can use the MS TT Core Fonts, you can replace all the Tahoma 8 by an Arial or Verdana font.

What about SUPER ? Will it be 100% binary compatible with the main openSuSE ? Is it stable enough ?

--Nooky59 07:26, 6 Sep 2005 (MDT)

About suse 10, in the guide you wrote: "Change the 0 value between the <double> tags for 18 and that will take care of deactivating hinting and anti-aliasing for the MS True Type Core Fonts."

but I've found that enabling antialiasing (and keeping hinting disabled) will produce a better result; let me know if you agree and think to update the guide; btw.. thanks for write it, very nice job!

Sorry but I didn't agree as I hate antialising on small size ;o) The goal of this tutorial is to have a SuSE with a MS like feeling in the fonts (and as written too in the HOW-TO from TLDP). If you have a visual rendering better than the stock SuSE one but with antialising, perhaps should you create another WIKI page ? But it seems that lot of users like theese settings as I can see on reviews and forums

p.s. I've included the <match> block of the ms fonts into my ~/.fonts.conf cause the file /etc/fonts/suse-hinting.conf is auto-generated ("Generated by SuSEconfig.fonts, don't edit, your changes will get lost"). I saw what you wrote in the introduction so I think you don't like the antialias tag set to true ;) anyway please have the user test it too; if you prefer I can directly edit the wiki article.

--VirtualDarKness 07:10, 8 Oct 2005 (MDT)

People, this works for Kubuntu as well! Great Stuff.

open office still looks bad

thanks for this article.

i hope i am not writing in the wrong place. sorry if i am :)

i followed the article on my new suse 10.0 KDE now looks great. firefox looks great. thanks!

...but to get open office looking right, i installed:

<< control-center2 >>

then did: $ gnome-font-properties

...and followed the article to the end, but my open office still looks bad.

can anyone help please?

I've updated the WIKI page quickly, without screenshot, the oOo section was empty before but the title were already there ;o) Now you should have a perfect render with oOo too thanks

john

No need to set BYTECODE_BW_MAX_PIXEL

Actually, for SuSE 10, one simply has to install the MS fonts and set 0-18 as range for non-anti-aliasing in kcontrol > appearance > fonts > advanced. The other parameter is only useful, if you want to use bytecode for all fonts and not only the TT-fonts.

Further, one has to change the konqueror settings > fonts from nimbus to sans (serif) to make koqnueror use tt-fonts, if the css just states sans-serif.

Great article, It made my SuSE 10 look really professional. Antialiasing always looks smudged to me. I inserted a few pics and added / edited the article a bit.

The Article wants to get font rendering looking like Windows. Windows DPI is 96x96. The author has some screen shots showing 99x99 DPI. Is there a reason for this?

Cheers to the author(s)

--dechrlam 20060226

Just perfect :-)

The font issue was driving me MAD, almost gave completly up on Suse 10.1 cause of it. Now Firefox renders fonts completly as if it where on my Windows 2000 install. Just had to set the fonts settings in Edit -> Preferences -> Content -> Label.Fonts & Colors -> Advanced to:
Sans serif : Arial
Monospace : Courier New

even though Im running 10.1

And i copied all Fonts from my windows install to Suse. Aint that the best solution?

Only thing that still bugs me is Flash 7, these fonts are still a bit blurry, but much more readable now. Ill try and play some more with that later.

Thanks to all that made this :-)

--BoSJo 03:59, 28 July 2005 (GMT+1)

Noelamac (about Tahoma font rendering):

Most likely, this is due to the SuSE fontconfig settings.

This goes for OpenSuSE 10.1:

Edit /usr/share/fonts-config/suse-hinting.conf.template

Around line 71 there is a line like

<match target="font">

followed by a list of fonts which will be rendered with bytecode interpreter settings. I don't know why, but the list is limited to a few M$ fonts. IMHO this doesn't make any sense, as I have never encountered a font which renders worse when byte-code interpreter is enabled. Thus, just comment out the following

<test name="family">

with a

(or delete it).

After calling

1. SuSEconfig --module=font

the results should be much better.

Everything looks great on my system now except OpenOffice

Excellent tutorial. Like others, I was growing very frustrated with my Linux display until I read it. One problem remains, however, the display in OpenOffice is still quite bad. The antialiasing is off, but the font rendering is very poor and the fonts appear crooked and broken. The rest of my apps work great, but no matter what I do, OpenOffice still looks bad. In your screenshot, everything looks very crisp, so I know it's possible.

Any thoughts?

Some Information on OpenOffice

I got the following from http://www.openoffice.org/FAQs/fontguide.html#4

Bad quality of screen font rasterization

Symptom

TrueType fonts look chiseled and angular on screen and/or have bad spacing while the same font looks quite nice in Mozilla, Gnome or KDE applications.

Problem description

OpenOffice.org uses the FreeType library for font rasterization. The FreeType library has been compiled with auto-hinting enabled and byte-hinting disabled. While auto-hinting does a reasonable job for grid fitting it's result is still inferior to byte-hinting for many fonts. Please have a look at http://freetype.sourceforge.net/patents.html for a discussion of that issue.

Trouble shooting

Currently there is no workaround for this issue. It is recommended to use an XServer that supports the antialiased graphical representation of glyphs for improved readability.

A possible solution

I've not tried this solution, which is described at http://wiki.unixboard.de/index.php/FreeBSD_-_Bessere_Schriften#OpenOffice This article is in German, so I translated it.

OpenOffice is somewhat special. It uses an own internal font renderer. By default the bytecode-interpreter is deactivated. To enable it, OOo has to be recompiled with the following option:

WITH_TTF_BYTECODE_ENABLED=YES

Setting this option, the bytecode-interpreter will be activated. But be carefull, compiling OOo lasts about 12 hours (I've no information how old this information is). By default, OOo uses anti-aliasing.

Bad news :-(((

JK 09:32, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

KDE Theme in article

Hello,

I think the KDE-theme which is used on the screenshots in the article looks very good. Can anyone say me where I can download it??

It seems to be KDE default in openSUSE 10.2. If you look at Firefox then it is Noia at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/72 . --Rajko M