This is part of The Pile, a partial archive of some open source mailing lists and newsgroups.
Subject: Re: Netscape looks like crud From: Alan Mead <adm@ipat.com> Date: Fri, 30 Jun 2000 09:32:42 -0500 At 11:54 PM 6/29/00 , you wrote: >The main problem is the fonts mostly are not clear and small regardless of >what I set the font settings to in the preferences. My monitor is perfect >for all other applications it is a 15" running at 1024x768 and before you >say that is my problem I can see everything else perfectly and prefer to run >at that resolution, I like small icons. Hey Kevin, I have almost the exact same setup. I would say that Netscape works fine, but it is often hard to read. I find that I can change the settings to use larger fonts (I can be specific if I email from home while in front of my machine) but I seem to need to do this for every execution (the settings do not stick). For me, this is a minor irritation as only the dumbest sites seem to create important text in tiny fonts (redhat.com was one IIRC:) and because I can go surf on .. ahem .. another operating system if aesthetics matter. There is a "font-deuglification" HOWTO at www.linuxdoc.org and some other info about X. I'm near to totally useless with X and this documentation didn't do much for me. I think I installed a TrueType font server and I have true type fonts but all fonts still seemed pretty crappy in limited futzing. If you have better luck, let me know what you've done. === Subject: Re: Netscape looks like crud From: Hal Burgiss <hburgiss@bellsouth.net> Date: Fri, 30 Jun 2000 11:30:38 -0400 On Fri, Jun 30, 2000 at 02:24:00PM +0930, Kevin Hancock wrote: > I have a Redhat 6.1, KDE desktop. fairly standard out of the box > install. I mostly work with the console and have never bothered with > the GUI much but now I would like to. > > My problem is Netscape looks like crud and is very hard to work > with. I remember hearing about a font problem or something needing > to be done to make netscape work Ok. > > The main problem is the fonts mostly are not clear and small > regardless of http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/mini/FDU.html (Font De-uglification) http://home.c2i.net/dark/linux.html#ttf http://feenix.eyep.net/xstuff/xfs.html === Subject: Re: Netscape looks like crud From: Nitebirdz <nitebirdz@uswest.net> Date: Fri, 30 Jun 2000 16:55:24 -0500 (CDT) The following document from Netscape's Technical Support section may also help: http://help.netscape.com/kb/consumer/19960513-54.html === Subject: Re: Netscape looks like crud From: Nitebirdz <nitebirdz@uswest.net> Date: Sat, 1 Jul 2000 14:07:44 -0500 (CDT) On Sat, 1 Jul 2000, Danny wrote: > - Hello > > Yes the fonts are a bit small on sites such as www.av.com > > But you can easily change the font setting by selecting edit -> prefences-> > Appearance -> fonts > > Then simply change the font sizes > Not really. That doesn't fix the problem in many sites, aside from the fact that it ends up screwing up the general layout of many pages. The whole thing boils down to how Linux and UNIX handle fonts, and there is a good chance that the problem will not go away until TrueType fonts are handled natively which XFree86 4.0 is supposed to do, although I didn't try it yet. === Subject: Re: Netscape looks like crud From: Hal Burgiss <hburgiss@bellsouth.net> Date: Sat, 1 Jul 2000 16:47:38 -0400 On Sat, Jul 01, 2000 at 02:07:44PM -0500, Nitebirdz wrote: > On Sat, 1 Jul 2000, Danny wrote: > > > - Hello > > > > Yes the fonts are a bit small on sites such as www.av.com > > > > But you can easily change the font setting by selecting edit -> > > prefences-> Appearance -> fonts > > > > Then simply change the font sizes > > > Not really. That doesn't fix the problem in many sites, aside from > the fact that it ends up screwing up the general layout of many > pages. The whole thing boils down to how Linux and UNIX handle > fonts, and there is a good chance that the problem will not go away > until TrueType fonts are handled natively which XFree86 4.0 is > supposed to do, although I didn't try it yet. XFree 4.0 is using the same font engine as RH6.x xfs. TrueType works fairly well with xfs, and makes a big difference with _most_ websites. And, I don't think it is a *nix problem as much as a webdesign problem where font families are specified that have no native *nix equivalents. === Subject: Re: [OT] TrueType fonts with XFree86 3.4.0 From: Robin Atwood <robin.atwood@ibm.net> Date: Sat, 1 Jul 2000 18:53:18 +0700 On Thu, 29 Jun 2000, Robin Atwood wrote: >With XFree86 3.3.x I was serving up TT fonts with xfstt, absolutely no problem. >I have installed XFree86 3.4.0 on a test partition and it seems to work very >well but how do I access my TT fonts? The support is supposed to be built in, >so I made sure the freetype modules was loaded and added a copy of the >Windows font directory to the font path. Result: nada. An encodings.dir file >is created but the fonts.dir file just has 0 in it. To respond to my own question, extensive research revealed you must get a copy of ttmkfdir and run this in your truetype fonts directory to make the fonts.dir file. This utility is normally supplied with the XFS package but I never used that. ===