Hacking Puppy's Fonts
Posted: Tue 23 Aug 2005, 22:43
Hi,
Well, I'm a newbie to puppy, though I've been using and sometimes tweaking linux since the early days. I have to say puppy seems to hit a real sweet spot of simplicity, size and utility. Well done !
One thing that still isn't fixed in Linux, and in other unices, are fonts.
The first problem I find, is that compared to windows and mac, they just look horrible. Puppy is no exception, I'm afraid - the antialiasing just doesn't cut it at smaller font sizes, and even the glyph placement seems to go wrong with some faces.
As a quick hack, all I've done today is follow the instructions here :
http://avi.alkalay.net/linux/docs/font-howto/Font.html
To summarize, I've acquired a libfreetype.so ( eg from http://ftp.club-internet.fr/pub/linux/p ... f.i586.rpm ) library that has the byte-code interpreter enabled, for font hinting, I've turned off autohinting by default in fontconfig, and turned sub-pixel aliasing on (I'm on an LCD, though it still looks good on a CRT), and acquired a couple of truetype fonts - I copied verdana.ttf and tahome.ttf from /windows/fonts on a windows XP install, to /opt/TTF.
My /etc/fonts/local.conf is as follows:
Its basically a filter on the replies to font queries, which basically says, whenever we find a font, that has an 'rgba' attribute, assign 'rgb' to the rgba attribute. And whenever we find a font, assign 'False' to the 'autohint' attribute, before returning the results to the application making the query.
I've also changed mozilla's fonts to use verdana, or tahoma, and modified the menu fonts etc, defined in $HOME/.mozilla/...../userChrome.css.
The second prooblem with linux is the plethora of different font schemes used by different apps - a mess for the average user (or even administrator) to deal with. I haven't made much progress on this - it seems to me a config app is required that can tweak all the different systems automatically.
Anyway, for just a quick bit of hacking, at least some of my apps now look comparable to windows and mac - substantially better than the standard linux install. I haven't measure memory use, performance, etc - but my take is that making text highly readable, and looking good is more of a priority. Or at least an option.
Just one caution - as detailed in the howto above - this is not neccessarily stuff that can go in a distro, as there are licensing issues.
I might knock up a HOWTO when I have things a bit slicker though.[/quote]
Well, I'm a newbie to puppy, though I've been using and sometimes tweaking linux since the early days. I have to say puppy seems to hit a real sweet spot of simplicity, size and utility. Well done !
One thing that still isn't fixed in Linux, and in other unices, are fonts.
The first problem I find, is that compared to windows and mac, they just look horrible. Puppy is no exception, I'm afraid - the antialiasing just doesn't cut it at smaller font sizes, and even the glyph placement seems to go wrong with some faces.
As a quick hack, all I've done today is follow the instructions here :
http://avi.alkalay.net/linux/docs/font-howto/Font.html
To summarize, I've acquired a libfreetype.so ( eg from http://ftp.club-internet.fr/pub/linux/p ... f.i586.rpm ) library that has the byte-code interpreter enabled, for font hinting, I've turned off autohinting by default in fontconfig, and turned sub-pixel aliasing on (I'm on an LCD, though it still looks good on a CRT), and acquired a couple of truetype fonts - I copied verdana.ttf and tahome.ttf from /windows/fonts on a windows XP install, to /opt/TTF.
My /etc/fonts/local.conf is as follows:
Code: Select all
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<!-- /etc/fonts/local.conf file for local customizations -->
<fontconfig>
<dir>/opt/TTF</dir>
<match target="font">
<test qual="all" name="rgba">
<const>unknown</const>
</test>
<edit name="rgba" mode="assign"><const>rgb</const></edit>
</match>
<match target="font">
<edit name="autohint" mode="assign"><const>False</const></edit>
</match>
</fontconfig>
I've also changed mozilla's fonts to use verdana, or tahoma, and modified the menu fonts etc, defined in $HOME/.mozilla/...../userChrome.css.
The second prooblem with linux is the plethora of different font schemes used by different apps - a mess for the average user (or even administrator) to deal with. I haven't made much progress on this - it seems to me a config app is required that can tweak all the different systems automatically.
Anyway, for just a quick bit of hacking, at least some of my apps now look comparable to windows and mac - substantially better than the standard linux install. I haven't measure memory use, performance, etc - but my take is that making text highly readable, and looking good is more of a priority. Or at least an option.
Just one caution - as detailed in the howto above - this is not neccessarily stuff that can go in a distro, as there are licensing issues.
I might knock up a HOWTO when I have things a bit slicker though.[/quote]