Problems with Font Antialiasing under KDE
Hi, I have the following problem with Suse Linux 7.3: If I activate font antialiasing in the control center, KDE won't start up the next time I log in. There's only a blank screen, no file manager icons, and no panel. All I can do is kill KDE with Ctrl-Alt-Backspace. If antialiasing is switched off, everything runs fine. Anyone experience similar problems? Anyone know a solution? I'd hate to do without font antialiasing... Remark: the problem started only after I opened the font installer for the first time. Seems like the font-installer performs some weird changes to the configuration files...? My system is a Dell Inspiron 7500 with a 1400x1050 display. I'd be grateful for any hints. Greetings Klaus __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Find the one for you at Yahoo! Personals http://personals.yahoo.com
I discovered recently, after enabling XFree86 4.0.3 on SuSE 7.2 that enabling antialiasing only works at all if you have installed some TTF fonts on the system, for which I used the Font Installer. At first I didn't do this and had a KDE session running with /no text/ at all because KDE couldn't find any fonts !!! I now have a second problem, one of my own making. I loaded 1,316 TTF fonts onto the system. It now takes 30 secs -> 1min to login, start any applications, anything :-( Memory usage has shot through the roof too and my nice 512MB box is now swapping nicely for the first time!! As I write this I'm downloading XFree86 4.1 to see if that will make any difference. If not, then I'm going to have to hand pick several hundred fonts to delete. Not fun :-( John On Sunday 18 November 2001 12:35 am, Klaus Voelker wrote:
Hi,
I have the following problem with Suse Linux 7.3: If I activate font antialiasing in the control center, KDE won't start up the next time I log in. There's only a blank screen, no file manager icons, and no panel. All I can do is kill KDE with Ctrl-Alt-Backspace. If antialiasing is switched off, everything runs fine. Anyone experience similar problems? Anyone know a solution? I'd hate to do without font antialiasing...
Remark: the problem started only after I opened the font installer for the first time. Seems like the font-installer performs some weird changes to the configuration files...?
My system is a Dell Inspiron 7500 with a 1400x1050 display.
I'd be grateful for any hints.
Greetings
Klaus
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Find the one for you at Yahoo! Personals http://personals.yahoo.com
On Saturday 17 November 2001 08:22 pm, John McNulty wrote:
I discovered recently, after enabling XFree86 4.0.3 on SuSE 7.2 that enabling antialiasing only works at all if you have installed some TTF fonts on the system, for which I used the Font Installer. At first I didn't do this and had a KDE session running with /no text/ at all because KDE couldn't find any fonts !!!
I now have a second problem, one of my own making. I loaded 1,316 TTF fonts onto the system. It now takes 30 secs -> 1min to login, start any
Use /usr/X11R6/bin/fetchmsttfonts to load fonts from MS on the internet that are the same fonts used by most websites (such as Times New Roman and Arial) and other programs expect. I have a problem in speed in initializing KDE, not in running programs. It usually waits during the last step, the part when it's supposed to be restoring the previous desktop; it freezes at 50% for a while before finally starting up KDE. Programs seem to start reasonably well, I'm running SuSE 7.2 on a Pentium 4 1.7GHZ with 512 megs RAM. However, I bet it's tough on a slower machine. I've heard that 7.3 is faster, though to use antialiasing one has to perform a fix on it reportedly. Of course, if the problem (not yours - I'm speaking to the list) is really a very slow system, try black box or fvwm2. (Black Box seems to look actually pretty, at least in it's default setup.) perhaps choosing another window manager, such as
The problem seems to be that every KDE application that has a font selector, re-reads the entire font list, processes it so as to display the font name in its own font, and then caches it. It takes a long time to process and munches a lot of CPU in the process, and you have repeat copies of this over and over. I think that possibly it's a design problem in KDE and that it needs some kind of cached central font selection repository. On Sunday 18 November 2001 2:35 am, Joshua Lee wrote:
On Saturday 17 November 2001 08:22 pm, John McNulty wrote:
I discovered recently, after enabling XFree86 4.0.3 on SuSE 7.2 that enabling antialiasing only works at all if you have installed some TTF fonts on the system, for which I used the Font Installer. At first I didn't do this and had a KDE session running with /no text/ at all because KDE couldn't find any fonts !!!
I now have a second problem, one of my own making. I loaded 1,316 TTF fonts onto the system. It now takes 30 secs -> 1min to login, start any
Use /usr/X11R6/bin/fetchmsttfonts to load fonts from MS on the internet that are the same fonts used by most websites (such as Times New Roman and Arial) and other programs expect.
I have a problem in speed in initializing KDE, not in running programs. It usually waits during the last step, the part when it's supposed to be restoring the previous desktop; it freezes at 50% for a while before finally starting up KDE. Programs seem to start reasonably well, I'm running SuSE 7.2 on a Pentium 4 1.7GHZ with 512 megs RAM. However, I bet it's tough on a slower machine. I've heard that 7.3 is faster, though to use antialiasing one has to perform a fix on it reportedly. Of course, if the problem (not yours - I'm speaking to the list) is really a very slow system, try black box or fvwm2. (Black Box seems to look actually pretty, at least in it's default setup.) perhaps choosing another window manager, such as
On Saturday 17 November 2001 10:02 pm, John McNulty wrote:
The problem seems to be that every KDE application that has a font selector, re-reads the entire font list, processes it so as to display the font name in its own font, and then caches it. It takes a long time to process and munches a lot of CPU in the process, and you have repeat copies of this over and over.
I don't think that applies to my problem (see bellow), but it does does apply to the problem of the original poster of this thread. BTW, your diagnosis of his problem seems to me like quite a brilliant piece of debugging, do you mind telling me how you managed to figure it out? :-)
I now have a second problem, one of my own making. I loaded 1,316 TTF fonts onto the system. It now takes 30 secs -> 1min to login, start any
Use /usr/X11R6/bin/fetchmsttfonts to load fonts from MS on the internet that are the same fonts used by most websites (such as Times New Roman and Arial) and other programs expect.
I have a problem in speed in initializing KDE, not in running programs. It usually waits during the last step, the part when it's supposed to be restoring the previous desktop; it freezes at 50% for a while before
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Saturday 17 November 2001 20:22, you wrote:
I discovered recently, after enabling XFree86 4.0.3 on SuSE 7.2 that enabling antialiasing only works at all if you have installed some TTF fonts on the system, for which I used the Font Installer. At first I didn't do this and had a KDE session running with /no text/ at all because KDE couldn't find any fonts !!!
I now have a second problem, one of my own making. I loaded 1,316 TTF fonts onto the system. It now takes 30 secs -> 1min to login, start any applications, anything :-( Memory usage has shot through the roof too and my nice 512MB box is now swapping nicely for the first time!!
As I write this I'm downloading XFree86 4.1 to see if that will make any difference. If not, then I'm going to have to hand pick several hundred fonts to delete. Not fun :-(
John
On Sunday 18 November 2001 12:35 am, Klaus Voelker wrote:
Hi,
I have the following problem with Suse Linux 7.3: If I activate font antialiasing in the control center, KDE won't start up the next time I log in. There's only a blank screen, no file manager icons, and no panel. All I can do is kill KDE with Ctrl-Alt-Backspace. If antialiasing is switched off, everything runs fine. Anyone experience similar problems? Anyone know a solution? I'd hate to do without font antialiasing...
Remark: the problem started only after I opened the font installer for the first time. Seems like the font-installer performs some weird changes to the configuration files...?
My system is a Dell Inspiron 7500 with a 1400x1050 display.
Well your problem is that you have load way to many fonts. From my understanding of things... normal usage etc... the most fonts you should use at a time are 100 to 150. Any other fonts you wish to you should be called in on an as needed basis, this is true in Windows as well. This is why font managers where invented, so fonts could be installed and removed on the fly. As far as I know there is no sane reason to have a 1000 plus installed on any computer. - -- b stephen One of The Board Members: Ottawa Canada Linux Users Group gpg & pgp keys can be found on the pgp.mit.edu or pgpkeys.mit.edu keyservers. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iD8DBQE79/xJ6CSA+AcepnIRAvyIAJsG7eZc/a0dJ8e8dZsOn973suaTUwCfekaT cb+QIT8JXfx3TJ1S+uuEuUI= =8pqB -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
On Sunday 18 November 2001 6:21 pm, b stephen harding wrote:
Well your problem is that you have load way to many fonts. From my understanding of things... normal usage etc... the most fonts you should use at a time are 100 to 150. Any other fonts you wish to you should be called in on an as needed basis, this is true in Windows as well. This is why font managers where invented, so fonts could be installed and removed on the fly.
I don't accept that. The fonts I pulled were straight out of the c:\windows\fonts directory on my laptop. It's a PII 400 with only 128MB of memory and it has no problem handling that many. Also, 98% of those fonts as I remember came from base W98, Office, and CorelDraw 8, hardly an off the wall or unusual selection of software. When Linux starts attracting these kinds of applications for general use on the Linux desktop (or buying font packs from their PC stores) users are going to just install them, and their fonts and end up in exactly the same situation I just did. There is no way that installing a large number of fonts should be allowed to cripple a system in the way this has, period! There is a design fault here ... pure and simple. You could even consider this to be a potential Denial Of Service bug, because if you look at the font path with xset, $HOME/.kde2/share/fonts/override is in the list. So any ordinary user could install a large number of fonts in his own account, login and bring the system to its knees!! Further more, I've discovered that if after loading all these fonts I turn antialiasing off, the fonts remain in the selector to be picked, but the problem goes away! So it's not the number of fonts that is the problem, it's the act of antialiasing them for display that's causing it.
As far as I know there is no sane reason to have a 1000 plus installed on any computer.
You almost got your arse toasted for that comment. But I've calmed down now and deleted my initial stream of invective :-)
On Sunday 18 November 2001 23:07, John McNulty wrote:
On Sunday 18 November 2001 6:21 pm, b stephen harding wrote:
Well your problem is that you have load way to many fonts. From my understanding of things... normal usage etc... the most fonts you should use at a time are 100 to 150. Any other fonts you wish to you should be called in on an as needed basis, this is true in Windows as well. This is why font managers where invented, so fonts could be installed and removed on the fly.
I don't accept that. The fonts I pulled were straight out of the c:\windows\fonts directory on my laptop. It's a PII 400 with only 128MB of memory and it has no problem handling that many.
OK, but did you turn on full anti-aliasing in windows (smooth fonts setting or something like that IIRC). Also: did you convert the fontfile names to lowercase (don't know if this is still neccesary, but it used to) and did you check if all fonts you copied are actually loaded and showing the way they should. Could be that only a few fonts are causing a lot of delay because of corruption, incompatibility etc.
Also, 98% of those fonts as I remember came from base W98, Office, and CorelDraw 8, hardly an off the wall or unusual selection of software. When Linux starts attracting these kinds of applications for general use on the Linux desktop (or buying font packs from their PC stores) users are going to just install them, and their fonts and end up in exactly the same situation I just did. There is no way that installing a large number of fonts should be allowed to cripple a system in the way this has, period! There is a design fault here ...
Maybe you're right but consider this: anti-aliasing is still in very eary stages of developement. It took M$ & Apple years and years to get it right, which could (!) mean that it's not that easy to do.
pure and simple. You could even consider this to be a potential Denial Of Service bug, because if you look at the font path with xset, $HOME/.kde2/share/fonts/override is in the list. So any ordinary user could install a large number of fonts in his own account, login and bring the system to its knees!!
Further more, I've discovered that if after loading all these fonts I turn antialiasing off, the fonts remain in the selector to be picked, but the problem goes away! So it's not the number of fonts that is the problem, it's the act of antialiasing them for display that's causing it.
As far as I know there is no sane reason to have a 1000 plus installed on any computer.
You almost got your arse toasted for that comment. But I've calmed down now and deleted my initial stream of invective :-)
I agree that 150 fonts is not very much if you're in the graphic design business (or hobby) and I also agree that a fontmanagement utility could come in handy. Does someone know of such a utility for Linux? How do you pick the sane font for the job from the insane long list? ;-) Happy anti-aliasing yours, Marcel
On Sunday 18 November 2001 11:06 pm, Marcel Broekman wrote:
OK, but did you turn on full anti-aliasing in windows (smooth fonts setting or something like that IIRC). Also: did you convert the fontfile names to lowercase (don't know if this is still neccesary, but it used to) and did you check if all fonts you copied are actually loaded and showing the way they should. Could be that only a few fonts are causing a lot of delay because of corruption, incompatibility etc.
Just checked and yes I have got "smooth edges of screen fronts" selected. As for your second part, I have to say I didn't think of that. I've just done a quick eyeball check and while many of them look ok, some don't at all right. Bummer!
Maybe you're right but consider this: anti-aliasing is still in very eary stages of developement. It took M$ & Apple years and years to get it right, which could (!) mean that it's not that easy to do.
I think you're probably right. I just tried printing a selection from inside a Kword file. Nothing happened, so I printed to pdf instead and only half of them appeared in the pdf file. Looks like Ghostscript is having problems with some of them too. I'd better make sure I installed them in Ghostscript correctly.
I agree that 150 fonts is not very much if you're in the graphic design business (or hobby) and I also agree that a fontmanagement utility could come in handy. Does someone know of such a utility for Linux? How do you pick the sane font for the job from the insane long list? ;-)
Well I've reduced it by a 1000 to just 300. Discovered that the KDE font installer could uninstall to a directory, so I squirelled the others away in /usr/local/fonts for safe keeping. The extra overhead is much less noticable now, though it's still there. Probably the best thing I can do at this point is take this up with the KDE developers and see if I can help them work with this, if I can find a kind sponsor :-) Thanks for your input Marcel. John
On Sunday 18 November 2001 05:07 pm, John McNulty, went on about:
On Sunday 18 November 2001 6:21 pm, b stephen harding wrote:
Well your problem is that you have load way to many fonts. From my understanding of things... normal usage etc... the most fonts you should use at a time are 100 to 150. Any other fonts you wish to you should be called in on an as needed basis, this is true in Windows as well. This is why font managers where invented, so fonts could be installed and removed on the fly.
JM>I don't accept that. (snip)
SH> As far as I know there is no sane reason to have a 1000 plus SH> installed on any computer.
JM>You almost got your arse toasted for that comment. But I've calmed JM> own now and deleted my initial stream of invective :-)
John, I'm sorry, I think I must agree with Stephen on the number of fonts. I don't know any good reason for having 1500+ fonts appear in your font list in any one program! I honestly don't remember any programs that would handle that many at once to begin with either. I know WordPerfect comes with about 140-150 different fonts and adding more than that doesn't show up from what I can tell. Some programs were written to take advantage of fonts from several different sources, so if you had a CD full of fonts, you could use them as well thru a font manager in the program. I don't believe any OS has a built in font manager thus a problem for you. As a long time desktop publisher, I also remember too many fonts were a problem anyway for you and the customer! I could understand how it would give you a wide range to choose from and there are so many because folks needed different ones for different purposes, but you need to figure out a logical way to use them other than all in one directory. Maybe the programs you want to use has a font manager, but for regular system fonts, cut them down, you will be happier and so will your system. :-) Regards, O'Malley -- ---KMail 1.3.1--- SuSE Linux v7.2--- Registered Linux User #225206 /tracerb@sprintmail.com/ *Magic Page Products* *Team Amiga* http://home.sprintmail.com/~tracerb
participants (6)
-
b stephen harding -
John McNulty -
Joshua Lee -
Klaus Voelker -
Lee O'Malley -
Marcel Broekman