Re: fonts

[nelson media mit edu (Nelson Minar)]

I got lots of replies back about my post about fonts. Two themes:

Others agree that X font selection is confusing (but useful sometimes!)

X can do TrueType fonts, which opens up a lot of options
  (XFree86 by itself? There's also a truetype font server, Xfstt)

My only comment on what I've received so far is that I agree that X's
support for scaled fonts is pretty good. In particular if you get the
freefonts package for Gimp you get quite a nice selection. And there
is a path to import fonts you buy. But what prompted my original post
was the lack of good fixed width fonts for things like emacs and
xterm/gnome-terminal. The problem here is that scalable outline fonts
tend not to work very well; fonts designed explicitly for a particular
screen size are usually better. And IMHO, the only two good ones in
XFree86 are 6x13 and 10x20 (9x15bold is OK too). It'd sure be nice to
have a good, say, 8x16 font. (The one in XFree86 is hideous and
unreadable. Serifs have no place on screen fonts!)

I don't know what the right way to go forward with this is. Maybe some
of the GNOME developers already have plans. If not, maybe we should
think about what a standard GNOME font selector should look like and
whether there are enough fonts in XFree86 to cover common needs. My
guess is that scaled fonts in X are fine, we just need to build a
better selector. The screen font situation is harder - maybe a second
selector specifically for those contexts would work. And GNOME might
want to ship some fancier fonts to go along with what's in XFree86:
the freefonts are a good place to start, and maybe we can find some
more screen fonts somewhere.