Date: Sat, 8 Nov 1997 15:40:43 -0500 (EST) From: "John S. Dyson" <toor@dyson.iquest.net> To: chat@freebsd.org Subject: FYI, about fonts on Xwindows Message-ID: <199711082040.PAA16703@dyson.iquest.net>
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I have been somewhat disappointed about the jaggedness of the default fonts on Xwindows (XFree86.) In fact, I have seen a rough look on most X86 Xservers. I have tweaked and tuned, and got it a little better (by correcting the order of the fonts in XF86Config and choosing better (bigger) fonts for xterm, etc.) However, it still wasn't very that good looking. It appeared to me that the scaled Type1 fonts were the worst. On a lark, I bought a copy of the package of the 65 or so standard fonts from Adobe (you can do it electronically, if you have one of their font CDROMs, which I do.) And it appears that apps that use scaled fonts look better (e.g. Netscape.) Fonts appear to have less aliasing (stairstepping or jaggies), and slightly better shaped. The hard part is to produce a copy of fonts.scale for the Xwindows fonts/Type1 directory. If you want a copy of mine, just ask. It should be okay to give 'fonts.scale' away, because it is just a config file. I cannot guarantee that you'll see a difference, but I think that I do. The Adobe Type Basics (65 fonts) costs $100, which is a bargain price for the fonts. However, that package is licensed only for one machine. If you buy the fonts individually, I think that you normally get a license for 5 machines, but they cost between $40 and $200 for a small package of a few fonts in a typeface. I think that one would likely violate the license if they would service fonts for multiple machines from the Type Basics font package. It might be possible to interpret the license to use the fonts on one other machine, but that is pushing it. In order to "get" the fonts from the Fonts-online disk, you have to have NT, 95 or a Sun to decode them (and of course pay Adobe for them.) Once you do that, it is easy to transfer them to your FreeBSD partition. -- John dyson@freebsd.org jdyson@nc.com
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