One of the more irritating things in linux is trying to get your fonts ‘just right’. If I look at an OS X or Windows desktop the fonts always look great. Obviously some executives involved in these operating systems thought it was a reasonably good idea not to present users with crappy looking fonts. If I look at various linux distros, some distro’s have fonts good out of the box, other’s seem to have some apps with good fonts and some with bad. By bad I mean ‘slightly blurry’. They’re readable, but they don’t look right. You look at the font on your nice LCD monitor and you find some characters are more blurry than others.<\/p>\n
So of course you google for info on fixing your fonts and find a zillion articles about the very topic. A typical one is the fonts wiki notes for Archlinux<\/a> . I found myself reading this the other day as I installed Archlinux in a seperate partition on my T42. It lists a bunch of recommendations to put in your .fonts.conf relating to ‘hinting’ and other things that you probably don’t care about (eg. the patent thing about the bytecode interpreter) … since you just want your bloody fonts to look better. I already had a .fonts.conf that I was using on Slackware, so I used the same one on Archlinux. Of course the fonts looked quite different under Archlinux. If anything they actually looked better, but its still a puzzle why fonts can be so different across linux distros.<\/p>\n I ended up switching back to Slackware for the time being (I could not get ‘expect’ to work without segfaulting on Archlinux … but I’m sure thats a feature). One program I use a lot is mrxvt (a tabbed terminal). It has freetype font support and I usually use ‘Bitstream Vera Sans Mono’ as a font and am generally happy … but I know it looks a little blurry. Usually I invoke it like;<\/p>\n mrxvt -ls -xftfn ‘Bitstream Vera Sans Mono’<\/p>\n S o I tried playing with options and noticed that the following gets rid of my blurriness;<\/p>\n mrxvt -ls -xftfn ‘Bitstream Vera Sans Mono’ -xftht<\/p>\n So now I’m moderately happy. If only I could now get textmaker<\/a> and planmaker<\/a> to have less blurry fonts, I would not be considering getting a Macbook. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the more irritating things in linux is trying to get your fonts ‘just right’. If I look at an OS X or Windows desktop the fonts always look great. Obviously some executives involved in these operating systems thought it was a reasonably good idea not to present users with crappy looking fonts. If […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linux"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}