Gdkxft transparently adds anti-aliased font support to GTK+ 1.2. Once you have installed it, you can run any (or, nearly any) existing GTK+ binary and see anti-aliased fonts in the GTK widgets. You don’t need to recompile GTK+ or your applications. The latest version of Gdkxft, version 1.3, adds AA support for Mozilla.
GDKxft 1.3 Patch Enables Anti-Aliasing on Mozilla
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Mozilla, when compililed with Qt, has had this for over a year now, not to mention Konqueror, Opera, etc.. which already have AA. looks like Moz/gtk is playing catchup bigtime.
When I’m hearing that under Linux this XXX app is already AA enabled, and that YYY one is not, I must admit that I’m staggered. How, in 2001, could a system like Linux (with XFree and KDE or Gnome) not beeing able to correctly handle fonts.
I’ve been trying for 2/3 years to make Linux be my everyday OS, but I always renounced because of such painful issue as Font handling.
My opinion is that though beeing a very powerful system for development, and deployment of server apps, Linux is very far from becoming a desktop system, I mean a desktop system that users would enjoy using.
Certain applications support AA fonts and such because of the toolkits they are linked against. KDE and Opera support them because QT, the toolkit they are linked against, supports it. GTK is evidently just adding support to it now which is why Mozilla, GNOME, etc. are supporting it.
If you don’t feel like using a specific toolkit or environment, http://freshmeat.net/projects/xfstt/“ xfstt is certainly and easy way to use TrueType/AA fonts in Linux.
I have been re-installing FreeBSD today to try and sort out font problems, first I had no AA and then it was not listing any truetype fonts and then it did not let me select fixed fonts correctly..and..and..I think you get the idea.
Why is font support so hit and miss on XFree? So many font types, do we really need Type1/Speedo/TrueType/Bitmap?? And even some apps have thier own font sets like Ghostscript and possibly tetex (IIRC) because screen fonts are apparently not good enough for printing and vice-versa.
Using fonts on Windows is a dream in comparison, I do think its one of the things holding adoption of Linux back.
Oh and another thing, isn’t it about time the archaic printing system got updated??
I know its all work and I dont profess to be able to do any of it but I would certainly like to do something just so I can use Linux/FreeBSD all the time.
</rant>