Re: [gentoo-desktop-research] One research problem we could research

[foser <foser@gentoo.org>]

On Thu, 2003-10-09 at 11:21, Paul de Vrieze wrote:
> I have one thing we might opt to research (after we have the project 
> procedures done). We might want to look into making good-looking fonts 
> available standardly.

This is already being worked on, but we're waiting for some improvements
in the xfree/fontconfig area to make this happen. It just isn't powerful
enough at the moment.

Anyway, this suggestion is very western centered, if you mess with
defaults you might easily end up with weird results for non-western
users.

> In a standard install esp. the helvetica and other adobe fonts are really 
> ugly. This should not be needed. Also we could try to make sure that the 
> fonts have exactly the same size as on windows in the browsers as there are 
> still webdesigners that work with font size assumptions for their layout.

You should install exactly the same fonts to have the same effect and
thats also a question of installing windows fonts or not. KDE just has
bad font defaults, helvetica everywhere is just a bad choice. Current
fontconfig setups should solve most of these problems afaik.

> Also I read a report complaining about openoffice fonts being ugly esp. on 
> gentoo (the only distro named). We should not just let that be, but try to 
> improve, and also write up a good manual on how and why fonts are beautiful/
> ugly.

afaik OO uses its own (outdated?) freetype etc. Do from source ebuilds
have these problems too ? They could use the system libs and settings.

- foser


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