Hi List! I'm reporting a (finally) successfull attempt to get crisp and clean looking fonts on my SuSE 9.2 / KDE 3.4.1 box. It took me quite a while to get the result that i have now, but the final procedure is (as is the case frequently) as easy as one-two-three, so i'm reporting it here for the archives and because i have unclear issues which i will be asking further below. One of the most frequently reported annoying problems on linux boxes is (IMHO) font display. There are myriads of HOWTOs and descriptions about getting truetype fonts and antialiasing working on a linux box, so i will not repeat what others have described in detail. On my own box at home, i always follow these descriptions so i have AA enabled and also have lots of free and less free truetype fonts installed. To enable & configure font antialiasing, i use the KDE control center, switch on antialiasing and set it to leave out font sizes of less than 15 points, apply the changes and restart my KDE session to let all KDE apps benefit from the changes. Result: Yuck! Or, more precisely: If I look close enough at the fonts on my LCD panel, i see some problems. Take for example the big letter A: In many fonts, the line from the bottom left point to the top middle is fuzzy and has additional "wrong" pixels in it. So, not knowing it better, i reconfigure antialiasing to not leave out smaller fonts. The result now is "better", i.e. the wrong pixels are smoothed by the antialiasing algorithm. But still! Small fonts now look sort of fuzzy and not really crisp. However, lacking time and energy, i usually leave the settings as they are and live with the font display as it is. Some time later, i stumbled upon references to the bytecode interpreter in the freetype2 library and that it would help to get better font display. I then read what the freetype2 folks write on www.freetype.org and did not enable the bytecode interpreter because it would require to re-compile the library which i would have liked to avoid. Also, the problem with the bytecode interpreter is that it needs patented algorithms, which is why it is disabled by default in almost all linux distros today. The freetype web page also mentions that their pixel-hinting algorithms are actually better than the bytecode interpreter, so they recommend to not enable it but to instead use their pixel-hinting algorithms. The page also explains why the bytecode interpreter and/or the pixel hinting is needed: The font glyph definitions contain bytes which are ignored by default and due to this, the wrong pixels i describe above are caused. I finally decided to give the bytecode interpreter a try, went to download the freetype2 sources (version 2.1.9, to be exact) and enabled the bytecode interpreter by removing the comments in one of the header files in the source code. What follows then is the usual combo of: ./configure make make install For freetype2, i also had to copy the resulting library files from /usr/local/lib to /usr/lib, but this was also done in a few seconds. I then restarted my KDE session and.... Wow! I must have been blind previously! All fonts are displayed clean and crisp, my LCD panel allowed me to distinguish each and every pixel and there were no "wrong" pixels anymore. I then re-configured anti-aliasing to start at the font size of 15, as it is supposed to be because antialiasing does not increase readability for small fonts, quite on the contrary: It makes them fuzzy! Of course, if the lack of the bytecode interpreter causes off-glyph pixels in most of the letters, antialiasing is the only way to smooth the glyph again, but this only blurs something which has been rendered badly in the first case. Did anybody encounter similar difficulties? Can anybody describe a method to get a similarly crisp and clean font display *without* the patented bytecode interpreter? I feel that this will simply not be possible because in KDE, you can only enable pixel hinting with antialiasing *enabled*, which tells me that small fonts will not benefit from pixel hinting because, as said above, antialiasing is supposed to be disabled for smaller fonts. I did play with the hinting settings that are offered by the AA config dialog but did not actually understand what i was doing, maybe i left out a variant that would have helped? Any other ideas and suggestions? Robert