[5434] in testers
Font path on 9.2 Linux favors scaled bitmap fonts
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David Z Maze)
Tue May 27 16:06:15 2003
To: testers@mit.edu
From: David Z Maze <dmaze@MIT.EDU>
Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 16:06:08 -0400
Message-ID: <87r86k40jz.fsf@cag.lcs.mit.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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My .Xresources file goes to special lengths to make sure that I'm
getting fonts whose display resolution matches the X server's reported
display resolution; as a result, I wind up frequently requesting
oddly-sized fonts and neither 75 nor 100 dpi. When I logged in today
on cutter-john (a SIPB 9.2 Linux machine), I noticed that "10-point
Helvetica" appeared blocky. Tracking down the font path, the Red Hat
setup appears to use a local font server, and that is set up (in
/etc/X11/fs/config) to use any font in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts
preferentially to any font in /usr/share/fonts/default, etc. In
particular, for the case of Helvetica, the ordering is
catalogue = /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc:unscaled,
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi:unscaled,
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi,
/usr/share/fonts/default/Type1,
...
so that when I want "10-point, 17-pixel, 123 DPI Helvetica", the font
server responds by scaling the bitmapped font rather than
instantiating the PostScript Type 1 font, of which the latter would
look infinitely better.
FEATURE REQUEST: can the directory list in /etc/X11/fs/config be
reordered to put all of the 75dpi and 100dpi (not unscaled) lines at
the end of the list?
--
David Maze dmaze@mit.edu http://www.mit.edu/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal."
-- Abra Mitchell
