Xorg Fonts Setup

This is a tutorial to get good looking fonts under Xorg, with anti-aliasing. It is taken from the Gentoo wiki.

Hardware

• It is said that having an monitor that does not do 96dpi will result in poor visual quality anyway. To know the dimension and DPI of your hardware use:

xrandr --query // this will give you the physical specifications of your monitor
xdpyinfo | grep -B1 dot // this will give you the current DPI used by X

• The true DPI is obtained by dividing the resolution of your monitor by its width in inches.

USE flags

• Add the global truetype USE flag.
• Add -bindist to the media-libs/freetype package.

Installing Fonts

• Emerge the following fonts:
  • media-fonts/corefonts
  • media-fonts/freefonts
  • media-fonts/ttf-bitstream-vera
  • media-fonts/artwiz-fonts
  • media-fonts/sharefonts
  • media-fonts/terminus-font
  • media-fonts/dejavu
  • media-fonts/liberation-fonts-ttf

Configuration Files

• In xorg.conf you only need to change the font paths:

Section "Files"

       FontPath    "/usr/share/fonts/misc:unscaled"
       FontPath    "/usr/share/fonts/Type1"
       FontPath    "/usr/share/fonts/TTF"
       FontPath    "/usr/share/fonts/corefonts"
       FontPath    "/usr/share/fonts/freefonts"
       FontPath    "/usr/share/fonts/sharefonts"
       FontPath    "/usr/share/fonts/terminus"
       FontPath    "/usr/share/fonts/dejavu"
       FontPath    "/usr/share/fonts/cyrillic"
       FontPath    "/usr/share/fonts/ttf-bitstream-vera"
       FontPath    "/usr/share/fonts/75dpi:unscaled"
       FontPath    "/usr/share/fonts/100dpi:unscaled"
       FontPath    "/usr/share/fonts/artwiz"

EndSection

The order matters! Also make sure you are loading the freetype module.

• /etc/fonts/local.conf

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<!-- /etc/fonts/local.conf file to configure system font access -->
 
<fontconfig>
 
<!-- DO NOT Use the Autohinter -->
 
	<match target="font">
       	<edit name="autohint" mode="assign"><bool>false</bool></edit>
       </match>
 
<match target="pattern" name="family">
	<test name="family" qual="any">
		<string>Courier</string>
	</test>
	<edit name="family" mode="assign">
		<!-- Other choices - Courier New, Luxi Mono -->
		<string>Bitstream Vera Sans Mono</string>
	</edit>
</match>
 
<match target="font">
<!--
	<edit name="rgba" mode="assign">
		<const>vrgb</const>
	</edit>
-->
	<edit name="autohint" mode="assign">
		<bool>false</bool>
	</edit>
	<edit name="antialias" mode="assign">
		<bool>true</bool>
	</edit>
	<edit name="hinting" mode="assign">
		<bool>true</bool>
	</edit>
	<edit name="hintstyle" mode="assign">
		<const>hintfull</const>
	</edit>
</match>
 
<!-- Reject bitmap fonts in favour of Truetype, Postscript, etc. -->
<selectfont>
	<rejectfont>
		<pattern>
			<patelt name="scalable">
				<bool>false</bool>
			</patelt>
		</pattern>
	</rejectfont>
</selectfont>
 
</fontconfig>

Testing

• To test, reload periodically xdm (/etc/init.d/xdm restart) while making changes to /etc/fonts/local.conf *and* in the KDE control center. Make the same changes in both places, then restart the X server.

• I think "the best setup" depends on you individual preferences. What I like is anti-aliasing with full hinting (not done by the autohinter, but by TrueType's Byte Code Interpreter - BCI), and to disable any sub-pixel hinting.

Mozilla Firefox Setup

• You can change the default fonts used in the Preferences. You should probably use Bitstream Vera, or the Red Hat Liberation family.

• Go to about:config, experiment with values such as font.FreeType2.enable, font.FreeType2.unhinted, font.FreeType2.autohinted.

Additional Fonts

• To get font support for other languages, you typically need to emerge other fonts (Chinese or Japanese ones for examples).
  • media-fonts/arphicfonts (Chinese)