Hi All, Faintly irritated by still-fuzzy fonts after doing a bit of work to get browser / general / especially Mozilla / fonts looking better (lots of good advice at http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/mini/FDU and in the Unofficial FAQ at $YOURLOCALMIRROR/susefaq/generalx.html), I took the bull by the horns and compiled and installed freetype 2.1.3 from http://www.freetype.org (./configure --prefix=/usr && make && make install seems fine). In case of screw-ups, I had backed up the libraries under /usr/lib, the include directory /usr/include/freetype, and /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/fonts/libfreetype.a (the only file I could find under the X11 hierarchy that seemed to be from freetype. Thinking myself smart, I copied the newly formed libfreetype.a from my build directory to /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/fonts/. That caused the X server to crash on restarting, putting the old libfreetype.a back where it was restored all to health. So the point of the mail is 1) freetype 2.1.3 really does seem, on my 8.1 i386 system at least, to provide signifcant improvement in the anti-aliasing / font-smoothing performance. See freetype's site for the scoop on why/how. You might want to check it out, but not before reading the various other advice and caveats at the addresses above. 2) Obviously I should have left /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/libfreetype.a alone, and not meddled. Can a patient person quickly and coherently explain why the system needs the old one left in place? I think I understood this once, but clearly don't now. Best Fergus -- Fergus Wilde Chetham's Library Long Millgate Manchester M3 1SB Tel: +44 161 834 7961 Fax: +44 161 839 5797 http://www.chethams.org.uk