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A grumpy user's browser review
A grumpy user's browser review
Posted Feb 11, 2004 18:22 UTC (Wed) by tseaver (subscriber, #1544)Parent article: A grumpy user's browser review
> The result is an ugly, hard-to-read screen which is reminiscent of the old
> Netscape 4.x days. Firefox behaves this way on Debian sid and Red Hat
> Linux 9 systems. Comments from others suggest that this is a problem that
> can be overcome, but it is clearly not a straightforward thing to do.
I found that the font rendering, which *did* suck on the "default" download, was vastly better after switching to the "gtk2+xfs" version.
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A grumpy user's browser review
Posted Feb 11, 2004 18:24 UTC (Wed) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link]
This is because the default uses the X core fonts rather than the Xft versions, which are the nice antialiased ones. I do wish they'd make the Xft version the default...
A grumpy user's browser review
Posted Feb 11, 2004 20:16 UTC (Wed) by TheOneKEA (subscriber, #615) [Link]
You can also use this: http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/IMO this should be noted somewhere on the Mozilla webspaces. In fact I think I will add it to the new MozillaZine Knowledge Base at http://support.mozillazine.org/
A grumpy user's browser review
Posted Feb 11, 2004 21:55 UTC (Wed) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link]
No, I meant that the non-Xft build uses the X core font system, the one which requires the long, complicated font specs (such as -bitstream-bitstream vera sans-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1)
The Microsoft set of TrueType fonts has nothing to do with the Firefox font rendering problem--its glyphs will be ugly too if the browser doesn't use the Xft libraries. The difference is that with the X core fonts, the browser asks the X server (or an X font server) directly for the font glyphs, which are returned as bitmaps. The new Xft method uses a completely different rendering engine which uses the font outlines intelligently and enables antialiasing and other neat features.