smoothe fonts on Fedora 1 and mozilla

[chewmanfoo 0]

Is it me, or does the display of mozilla 1.4.1 that came with my Fedora 1 look smoother - characters less pixellized?

 

I'm sure of it! Somehow, the fonts are easier on the eyes.

 

I installed mozilla 1.6, the browser is wonderful, but the fonts are jagged and look like crap. What am I doing wrong?

 

TIA!

chewy

[Dapper Dan 0]

Don't know, but the fonts in Galeon look pretty good!

[Maillion 0]

I don't know either - I use Mozilla 1.6 on Windoze and it looks good! Look in your Mozilla "Edit/Preferences" (In the menu bar at the top) and see what fonts are there in the "Appearance" segment... 8)

[chewmanfoo 0]

I'm referring to Fedora Core 1 (yarrow).

 

Anybody know what causes this?

[Dapper Dan 0]

My fonts in IceWM don't look great with Fedora like they did with RH9. Hmmm...

[Dapper Dan 0]

I have worked my tail off all day trying to get these menu fonts in IceWM to look as good under Fedora as they do in RH9 and have come up empty. Boy, this one is tiring me out... ;(

[nosferatu 0]

I have this same problem with Fedora core 1 and mozilla fonts. the version of mozilla (1.4.1) which came "packaged" with Fedora is fine, but if I download and install any later version, the fonts are crap and there's not the same choice in the "edit", "preferences", "appearance", "fonts" menu.

 

I can only assume it's something to do with the installation directories the fedora version of mozilla uses. Bits of it are installed all over the place like /usr/lib/mozilla, usr/bin/mozilla. but if you install the tar ball from mozilla it installs everything in the same directory.

 

I'm starting to find this kind of thing pretty boring to be honest and I can't find any solution to it. It's one of the reasons why even tho linux is a superior platform for servers, the desktop stuff is pretty mich a "geek's toy". Maybe it just depends on the distribution and how the distributors chose to install things, but it's just so hard to get answers to this stuff - OK if you want a hobby I guess...

[trondare 0]

This isn't a Fedora or Linux problem in general, only a package problem. Obviously his new mozilla is compiled without XFT support, so his fonts aren't anti-aliased. Out of the box Mozilla in Fedora 1 should work fine. FC1 is getting older, better go for FC2, or wait a month and install FC3.

[nosferatu 0]

Sure, the out-of-the-box Mozilla with FC1 works fine, but you can't upgrade and take advantage of security features or other new features. Not unless you want to put up with crappy fonts.

[trondare 0]

Originally posted by nosferatu:

Quote:

Sure, the out-of-the-box Mozilla with FC1 works fine, but you can't upgrade and take advantage of security features or other new features. Not unless you want to put up with crappy fonts.

 

Sure you can, just use a package compiled with XFT support. Mozilla

even provides a yum'able repository:

 

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mozilla/yum/SeaMonkey/releases/current/redhat/1

 

If no such package was available you could also install the SRPM,

edit the spec file and add --enable-xft or whatever.

[rag 0]

Perhaps what the problem is is that some Postscript fonts do not render well for screen use. I have set up Mozilla 1.7.3 to use Bitstream Charter and Bitstream Vera Sans, and it seems that they are picked up in antialiased Xft form by Mozilla. (On FC2).

 

If you look in the Gnome font browser (or the KDE equivalent) you will find that some fonts render far better than others. This is almost certainly down to the question of hinting in the original fonts, which usually improves screen display but makes little difference to printed output.

 

The scribus web site has an interesting piece on fonts at http://docs.scribus.net/index.php?lang=en&sm=setup&page=fonts2 , which points out some of these problems. ("Also, do not be put off by the lack of a great screen preview with the URW fonts - they are excellent printer fonts. Font faces like Palladio and Utopia for example, are not really attractive on screen, but they are excellent fonts for easy to read documents.")

 

R.