Mark, On Sunday 03 July 2005 05:13, Mark Crean wrote:

Hi

SuSE 9.2 has really nicely anti-aliased type compared to Debian which I also have on my system - good solid lettering, good contrast between black and white, minimal smudging around letter forms, etc.

I'm guessing that the SuSE technicians must have tweaked a few files to achieve this. Does anyone know which ones? I'd like to try to improve the rather basic look and feel on my Debian install.

TIA

This is a very complex area. (Typography, in general, is a very subtle field with a lot of counter-intuitive characteristics). When I switched to an LCD display and a DVI-D-capable video adaptor, getting good results became much more demanding. For starters, the configuration that provides the best results depends in part on the kind of display hardware you have (including both the vide display and the video card). The tastes and visual abilities of the human involved are also a part of the equation. The following suggestions are KDE- and English- specific. It's all I know. Start by opening the KDE control panel, expanding the "Appearance & Themes" and selecting the "Fonts" section. Now begin playing around. Try different fonts and experiment with the anti-aliasing parameters. Sub-pixel hinting is helpful for LCD displays. Lastly note that many key applications contain their own font controls (KMail, Akregator, KNode, Mozilla / Firefox, Konsole, and on and on). If you cannot get satisfactory results with the controls available in the Control Panel or in the individual applications, the next thing to do is consider rebuilding the FreeType software with the so-called bytecode interperter enabled (it is off when shipped by the commercial distributions so as to avoid the wrath of Apple, who hold patents on the TrueType hinting mechanism). For information on the latter, search the list for the past few months for messages pertaining to rebuilding FreeType with hinting enabled. This might help: <http://portal.suse.com/sdb/en/2001/11/mfabian_bytecodeinterpreter.html>, though it refers to a rather old version of SuSE Linux.

:)

Fish

Good luck. Randall Schulz