Okay, it’s out there, I’m fed up with fonts on Linux. Every Distro is different, there are 50 zillion fonts installed by default, but the forums are still filled up with ‘how do I get Verdana onto Suse’?
Can we (as a distro!) get on the front-foot with this? Rather than rely on ‘how to get good looking fonts in 11.x’ articles, maybe we can just get some preconfigured settings in a script that give some options on KDE/Gnome…
purely open source (freetype with hinting, liberation fonts etc)
looks like win/xp/7
Looks like MAC
…then people can hint and tweak to their hearts content. This isn’t a matter of copying another O/S - but understanding that users come from different environments, and they want ‘what they had before’. Maybe this isn’t the final package, but we need to offer something to give users an steer…
Yup, that’s exactly what I’m trying to avoid. Users having to hunt through forums. Lets get this into the distro… It’s not rocket science, maybe it’s even an enhancement to KDE’s existing options: no/slight/full hinting, just have some options pre-rolled in there that actually give the users some real-world options for how their desktop looks. Lets face it, the simplest of things (like this) can affect a users entire impression of the distribution.
What happens if you perform a search in Yast - Software Management for “verdana” with the options “RPM provides” and “Filelist” checked ? It returns the “fetchmsfonts” package. Install, done.
Got no idea if it’s true or not but from what I’ve read a lot of fonts are proprietary stuff and like codecs cannot be included in openSUSE distribution because of law regulations. I’ve also heard that for example Ubuntu doesn’t care about that at all and distribute nice fonts with the distribution. Still I’ve got no idea what is true or false here.