Linux Desktop Distros with Quality Fonts?

occamboy writes "I'm trying to make a case for switching to Linux desktops, and would like to demonstrate how advantageous Linux is. While the advantages of Linux are more obvious for us techies, I'm finding that many non-technical types are immediately negatively biased by the look of Linux desktops. The problem boils down to screen fonts. It seems that, in the distributions that I've demonstrated, the screen fonts are either all aliased, or are aliased in some places and antialiased in others, which I've been told resembles a ransom note with letters cut from different magazines. I can understand where these critics are coming from; after all, they are staring at fonts on a monitor all day long. Are there any distributions that I can demonstrate which provide smooth and consistent screen fonts without requiring a lot of messing around?"

here

[Anonymous Coward]

try bitstream vera sans and use kde control center to set antialias settings. gnome has a tool too for font stuff. oh and btw stop demoing cli ok?

Re:It's all the same

[rincebrain]

Yes. Yes they do.

Go compare RedHat to Gentoo to Knoppix to Mandrake.

I don't think so.

[login.pl]

I'm not trying to troll but of all the users that I've encounterd none of them would give a second thought to crappy fonts. You don't know how many times I've sat in front of a user's nice LCD monitor set to a non-optimal resolution with antialiasing OFF!

Re:It's all the same

[thegrassyknowl]

But some make it easier than others; We run RH9 at work and I think it (mostly) looks great. It's also quite easy to install true-type fonts on RedHat.

There are RPMS available here [sourceforge.net] to allow installing the MS core fonts (Arial, Comic, etc).

Most Windows users seem to miss a few of the MS fonts, and are infinitely happier when they are available and configured for use.

Nearly all of the applications use the KDE font settings and anti-aliassed fonts. It's only the few older apps that don't get used anyway that seem to screw it up.

Oh, and use good fonts

[leonbrooks]

Probably preaching to the choir on this one, but if you only use crappy fonts, you will not ever get good results.

There are plenty of good, free TTFs kicking around, starting with the Microsoft ones [sourceforge.net] (yes Rheba, before they realised [microsoft.com] that competitors could use them too, the Evil Empire released some of the good things they make, for free. It's difficult to make insecure fonts, but I'm sure they tried :-).

Re:here

[BladeMelbourne]

I love the Bitstream fonts - on Windows and Linux.

It's 3 fonts really...
Bitstram Vera Sans
Bitstram Vera Sans Mono
Bitstream Vera Serif

Bitstream Vera Sans is very readable in web pages - IMHO more so than Verdana. And the mono font is ideal for when I write SQL/XHTML/etc at home/work.

http://www.gnome.org/fonts/ [gnome.org]

I dont have any problems with fonts on Fedora Core 2. The fonts look pretty decent in Knoppix 3.6 too.

PS: Bitstream fonts look great in Macromedia Fireworks, but the gimp still rocks. ;-)

Munjoy Linux

[degreesK]

Good looking fonts is one of the goals of Munjoy Linux [munjoylinux.org].

How to

[Apreche]

Set your fonts in X. Use freetype. You have to set fonts in many many places. GTK theme. Qt theme. Xdefaults. Application specific font settings. You have to go through all these places to set the font. Some distros like Fedora Core 2 and the newer Mandrakes I know use a similar font consistently by default in all these places. But if you want consistent fonting your only real option is to go through all these places and change the fonts. It's just a fact of life. If you want the power to have different fonts in different places you have to go to all these places to change the font if you want it to be the same in all places.

I reccoment Bitstream Vera Sans. It is very nice and simple.

95 distros - only one good font

[ArmorFiend]

Its funny, but there's really only one quality AA font for Linux right now: Bitstream Vera. Sure you can buy others, or loot them from your windows partition, but regardless of your disto the only good free one is Bitstream Vera.

Don't leave home without it.

Re:Mandrake 10.0

[boredMDer]

' some of the Debian-based distros (Gentoo, Knoppix)'

Gentoo is not a Debian based distro.

Re:It's all the same

[Paul d'Aoust]

I kinda tend to side with you: although distro maintainers do put a lot of work into making sure Freetype is working properly across the board (this involves checking the Big Two toolkits, Qt and GTK+, and their companion desktop environments, KDE, GNOME, and XFCE, as well as OpenOffice and Mozilla, who dance to the beat of their own drums as far as fonts are concerned), every distro provides pretty darn similar software, and as long as you know what you're doing, you can get software from whatever distro working okay.

On that note, I would recommend just going with one desktop environment and one toolkit for the most part; this will make changing font settings for (almost) all programs a one-step task. I believe KDE was the pioneer in bringing things like antialiasing and subpixel decimation (for LCD monitors) to the desktop in an easy-to-control, one-step way, but GNOME is just as easily customiseable now (if not more so -- but I have no idea; I haven't used KDE for a while). From my experience (in Gentoo, at least) the GNOME control panel also changes font default and aliasing settings for Firefox, but OpenOffice is a hit-and-miss affair. Anyway, I stick with GTK+ programs for the most part, so one change in the GNOME control panel and all my programs have a fresh font.

For a really lovely serif font, try Gentium [sil.org]. It has almost every glyph under the sun, in one attractive style. Unfortunately, this comprehensiveness also has a drawback -- they haven't managed to design bold and italic alternates yet. But if you want to show off the international support of Linux to all your Russian, Greek, and Jewish friends, Gentium is the font for you.

Sorry, I get a little starry-eyed about fonts. It's the graphic designer in me.

Mandrake + PLF + MSFonts

[Danious]

Grab Mandrake 10, upgrade to the PLF version of freetype2 (extra patented goodness turned on), install the MSFonts and run KDE.

Done.

Oh, and use a CRT for demo's: LCD + NVidia + XFree can take a bit of tweaking to get right.

John.

Why fonts look bad in free distros: HINTING

[Anonymous Coward]

It's because of patents [sourceforge.net].

TrueType font hinting is patented by Apple. To legally use TrueType hinting, you must pay royalties to Apple. This is why fonts look crappy in the free distros. (And no, antialiasing is not a substitute for proper hinting.)

However, I don't know which (if any) pay-ware Linux distros have TrueType font hinting enabled.

Font sizes on high-res monitor

[greppling]

My laptop has a 1920x1200 LCD monitor, and so I know too well about the problem you are describing...

Interesting enough, this seems to be solved much better in X than in Windows. All my KDE apps etc. have just normally sized fonts out of the box; whereas in Windows I have to manually adjust many font sizes, and many apps cannot be adjusted at all.

The only problem in X are programs that assume to know how many pixels their text messages use up, with the result of having text boxes etc. in which the text just doesn't fit in at all...

Re:Oh, and use good fonts

[Trepalium]

Microsoft didn't make most of those fonts, but rather just licensed them from Monotype and B&H. Comic Sans MS, Georgia, Tahoma, Trebuchet MS, Verdana and Wingdings are the only ones that MS created (presumably). Arial [fonts.com], Times New Roman [fonts.com], and the other very well known ones are Monotype [monotype.com] fonts.

Nice Font

[Goo.cc]

I like Mark Simonson's Anonymous font, which is a very nice, fixed width truetype font. You can get it here [ms-studio.com].

Re:Munjoy Linux

[reallocate]

Munjoy looks good because it defaults to the equally good fonts produced by its creator, who also also tweaked KDE's Asteroid theme to good purpose. Toss in dbus, udev and a few other goodies and it is an excellent Debian-unstable derivative.

As for apt, it handles a dist-upgrade with no problems. Although it is KDE centric, I've installed and used Gnome with no problems appearing.

The current release can't handle Nvidia's proprietary driver. So, if 3D is a big deal for you, wait for the next release. (FWIW, installing dbus on a stock Debian unstable machine seems to keep X from finding the Nvidia driver.)

Re:Really?

[tepples]

You know, you can turn Windows XP's ClearType off, which will give you antialiasing with gray edges, the same way it was on Windows 98 and 2000. The colored edges are there to make it show up better on LCD panels.

Fontconfig manipulation

[brain_fear]

Try manipulating fontconfig Add the following to ~/.Xresources or/and ~/.Xdefaults Xft.hinting:false Xft.hintstyle:hintnone This should smooth fonts