Having in mind that this will sound quite rude, I have to say that with openSUSE 11.1 the ugly fonts problem is at their worst ever.
KDE 4 applications are more or less OK. KDE3 applications has yet different fonts. Firefox and other GTK applications are in their own world of ugly fonts, and OpenOffice is somewhere in between. Not to mention Java/Eclipse based applications, e.g. Lotus Notes.
Any idea how to de-uglify those fonts? Iād be more than happy to write a document on how to set nice fonts in suse, especially as I have to do that after each system upgrade.
FWIW, I have openSUSE 10.3 set up pritty nicely, and I avoided upgrades for this ugly fonts problem onlyā¦
Any suggestions are more than welcome.
On the good side, openSUSE 11.1 seems to run faster (!) than 10.3 on the same hardware! Way to go, SUSE Team!
He means the rendering, not just font face. I have plenty of Microsoft fonts here and everything still looks awful.
I just tested Fedora, Mandriva and PC-BSD. The fonts look fine. I know they also look fine in Slackware. Just spin any distro live CD for five minutes and you will see the difference. openSuse FAIL.
Yes, the rendering is problematic. I remember using suse 8.something and since then Iām always fighting with the fonts rendering. But again, it might be the KDE related issue. I never tried Gnome in Suse, nor KDE in some other distribution, but I might try, though.
Anyway, Iām getting closer to what Iām looking for (my 10.3 setup, actually)ā¦
Iāve had some problem with fizzy fonts. For me it got fixed after setting the hinting style to full in the kde4 anti-aliasing settings (kde4 settings -> appearance -> Fonts and look out for the anti aliasing setting. Maybe this helps in your case too
i must admit that fonts in OpenSuSe are among the worst in any distro I have come across. I am not an Ubuntu fan but their font rendering is just plain awesome, like mickeysofts. Fedora also (in gnome) does a halfway decent job and on Arch I just install the ubuntu freetype patches to make it look good.
Wish there were patches like these for OpenSuse since obviously it cannot be solved by selecting different types of fonts and anti-aliassing and hinting only does so much I have seen.
I also think that KDE4 especially suffers from plain ugly fonts, this goes beyond a SuSe problem imho.
What makes me sad, to say so, is that KDE4 has its own font appearance settings, which donāt propagate to KDE3 applications still available (e.g. Network Manager), not to mention GTK based apps, plus Java (SWT) apps are completely different beasts.
Iāve visited both Ubuntu and Fedora forums and find the same complaints, only there a small select group of users are complaining about the fonts on their distribution, with statements that they have the worst of any distribution.
Fortunately the beauty of Linux is its about choice, and there are ways to change the font presentation to tune it to oneās HIGHLY SUBJECTIVE tastes.
Search this site <http://forums.opensuse.org/search.php> for the
many previous posts with hints on how to fix the problem. After doing
that myself about six months ago my fonts are beautiful.
Hope they stay that way because these are the only notes I took
(dashed line between the various posts that I followed: maybe it
helps you maybe notāSEARCH for yourself):
Then set your fonts with āconfigure desktopā in KDE
The adjust your bytecode interpreter
go to
Yast2 > System ? etc/sysconfig editor > desktop >
Bytecode_BW_Max_Pixel
and change setting to 18
Then enable subpixel hinting using āConfigure Desktopā, āAppearanceā
and āFontsā - āUse anti-aliasingā. I stuck with the default RGB
Horizontal, full. I havenāt forced the fonts to a set dpi either.
set the antialiasing in your desktop config to how you like.
Personally I set mine to full antialiasing with font sizes between 6
and 14ā¦
Here you have lossless screenshots of GTK (Firefox), KDE4 (Konqueror), openOffice.org, KDE3 (showFoto) and SWT/GTK (Vuze) running in my 11.1 system.
Note that I use a CRT monitor, so no subpixel hinting in these images.
openOffice.org seems to wrongly detect the DPIs of my screen, so fonts are bigger (in the screenshot font size is 10pt instead of 12pt to look more similar). Everything else looks fine and consistent.
BYTECODE_BW_MAX_PIXEL set to 18 (so MS Fonts donāt use antialias and use embedded hinting info) and EMBEDDED_BITMAPS_LANGUAGES set to nothing (even if I donāt know if this makes any difference).
I have qtcurve-(gtk|kde|kde4) installed, my DPIs set correctly (my monitor wongly specifies its size through EDID) and changed āSans Serifā for āArialā in KDE4 font properties because of Access Denied.
Thatās all, but note that I have neither ā~/.fonts.confā nor ā~/.gtkrc-2.0-kde4ā.
Iām using 11.1 KDE4,best font for english so far is WenQuanYi Zen Hei,set the DPI to 120,adjust the font size to 11. In Firefox,select above font for Western,size as 15. A screenshot for u : http://img338.imageshack.us/img338/157/10979846dk5.jpg[/UR[/IMG]
well to be honest I think those fonts actually look rather bad, just like mine.
At first I thought it was just me but due to this thread I installed ubuntu 8.10 on my spare pc just to check the difference and I must admit that it is insane how much better the ubuntu fonts look.
Admittedly fonts are personal and Kubuntu is actually rather crappy in the KDE department so I used a gnome ubuntu versus a KDE4 opensuse so some might be due to the fact that for some reason KDE4 does something horrible to fonts (imho the better looking fonts are all on Gnome-centric distros) but it was nearly enough to make me cough keep ubuntu on that pc cough (the dark theme is also actually rather nice by the way).
and it must be something ubuntu is doing right because when I load the freetype-ubuntu stuff from AUR on Archlinux I get the same crispy fonts in ARch as opposed to the vanilla packages.
This thread taught me a few things :), one is that my fonts are looking great now and second is that I finally got rid of the ugly default OpenSUSE forum skin (thanks to oldcpuās screenshot).
It shows Firefox, OpenOffice and KDE application. Note how the fonts are consistent, both in size and general appearance.
I admit that I had spent some time adjusting the font settings on 10.3 as well, but what drives me crazy is the need to do that with every new version of opensuse.
You must have provided a horrible screen print then (in your 1st screen print), because in my subjective opinion, my fonts are way superior to yours (in your 1st screen print) ! :rolleyes:
euhm well actually i didnt upload a screenshot yet, i havent been home yet, been too busy, lazy, xmas or whatever silly excuse not to have done so but any screen you might be referring to is defenitely not mine.
those fonts? Iād be more than happy to write a document on how to set nice fonts in suse, especially as I have to do that after each system upgrade.
S.
